Bernard DeVoto Quotes

22 quotes in 380 categories

• Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved…
• The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
• It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve…
• 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…
• The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
• History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
• Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind. The skillful man is, within…
• One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The…
• Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
• 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…
• 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…
• You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is…
• 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…
• The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
• The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
• The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
• When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.
• The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
• The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart,…

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