The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affectations glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
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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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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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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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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. . . .
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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 achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
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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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You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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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.
BERNARD DEVOTO