Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
BERNARD DEVOTOBetween the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
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When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn.
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The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
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The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop – for convenience, the one hundredth meridian – you have reached the West.
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The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
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Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . .
BERNARD DEVOTO