Bernard DeVoto Quotes

Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.

Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.

When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.

One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.

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.

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.

You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.

The water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.

The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.