Q: What is purple and commutes?

A: An Abelian grape.

The Least Perceptive Literary Critic

The most important critic in our field of study is Lord Halifax. A

most individual judge of poetry, he once invited Alexander Pope round to

give a public reading of his latest poem.

Pope, the leading poet of his day, was greatly surprised when Lord

Halifax stopped him four or five times and said, "I beg your pardon, Mr.

Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me."

Pope was rendered speechless, as this fine critic suggested sizeable

and unwise emendations to his latest masterpiece. "Be so good as to mark

the place and consider at your leisure. I'm sure you can give it a better

turn."

After the reading, a good friend of Lord Halifax, a certain Dr.

Garth, took the stunned Pope to one side. "There is no need to touch the

lines," he said. "All you need do is leave them just as they are, call on

Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observation

on those passages, and then read them to him as altered. I have known him

much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."

Pope took his advice, called on Lord Halifax and read the poem

exactly as it was before. His unique critical faculties had lost none of

their edge. "Ay", he commented, "now they are perfectly right. Nothing can

be better."

-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

You have the power to influence all with whom you come in contact.

These revolutionaries, bare-necked politickers, have preserved with the imprint of the collar, the moral stain of servitude, the stiff neck of despotism.

-- Joseph Dejacque

Eliminating the legal enforcement of DRM -- by criminal, mind, not civil law -- would effectively destroy all business models based on proprietary digital information.

-- Kevin Carson

The fight against the destruction of surplus product and against hoarding in Brazil cannot be carried out through the state, but through consumer cooperatives, which affiliated with powerful federations, will be able to deliver to the market and finance production and regulate prices on a fair basis.

-- Mario Ferreira dos Santos

Big book, big bore.

-- Callimachus

At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement,

especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously

-- I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being

in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching

after fact and reason.

-- John Keats

Revolution is indeed a violent process.

-- Emma Goldman

The state, the society, the institutions, the body politic, the nation, the system, or customs we live in, must not be permitted to become primary, but must be secondary!

-- Josiah Warren

As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.

-- Oscar Wilde

Always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.

-- William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.

-- Mark Twain

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last

you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his

Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

-- Mark Twain "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"

F.S. Fitzgerald to Hemingway:

"Ernest, the rich are different from us."

Hemingway:

"Yes. They have more money."

In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and

struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny

and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the

crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.

-- Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, on the generic Canadian

novel.

What I tell you three times is true.

-- Lewis Carroll

Q: Who cuts the grass on Walton's Mountain?

A: Lawn Boy.

Many changes of mind and mood; do not hesitate too long.

The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.

-- James Larkin