Quotes -- Invective


Copyright © 2002 by Hugo S. Cunningham
started 20020819
updated 20070905
minor update 2008/1116

Index

quote and authorsource-- book or URLquote in original language (if applicable)


Invective

About Lillian Hellman (1905-1984):
"I once said in an interview that every word she [Hellman] writes is a lie, including 'the' and 'and.'"
    --Mary McCarthy on The Dick Cavett Show (TV), January 1980
from Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1988; p. 302.
Added y20819
According to Johnson, McCarthy, an anti-Stalin leftist, had in mind Stalinist Hellman's statements about John Dos Passos, Spain, and a 1949 Waldorf conference (and perhaps about Tallulah Bankhead). Hellman sued McCarthy, spawning legal bills that the wealthy Hellman could afford and McCarthy could not. Nevertheless, the case brought McCarthy support from friends and info on other Hellman scandals, notably Hellman's autobiographical Pentimento, recounting her supposed rescue of an anti-Nazi activist "Julia" (later made into a successful film titled "Julia"). It turned out, however, that Hellman's heroism was entirely fictional, plagiarized from the unpublished life story of Muriel Gardiner. [Samuel McCracken, "Julia and Other Fictions by Lillian Hellman," Commentary, June 1984]. Hellman's death on 3 July 1984 made the lawsuit moot.
"Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?"
    --Originally, Genesis 4:9 (Bible).
    --recycled by L.D. Trotsky in 1936, mocking Stalin for the judicial murder of Abel Yenukidze, an old-time revolutionary associate.
I believe I read it in
David King, The Commissar Vanishes, p #?
Added y20819
About G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936):
"Mr. Chesterton has thoughts, but I see no evidence that he thinks."
    --[T.S.?] Eliot
James Wood, "Roman Holiday: [A Review of] Gary Wills, Why I Am a Catholic," printed in "The New Republic," 19 August 2002, p. 40
Added y20913
"There are two things wrong with you. Everything you say is wrong, and everything you do is wrong."
    --John H. Patterson (1844-1922), notoriously irascible (but effective) boss of National Cash Register (NCR), to various unfortunate subordinates on numerous occasions.
William Rodgers, Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM, Stein and Day, New York, 1969; p. 123.
Added 20060827
"sh*t in a silk stocking"
    --Napoleon describing Talleyrand (1754-1838), who had been intriguing against Napoleon's foreign policy.
(widely available on Internet)
Added 20070620
French:
"La merde dans un bas de soie."
"as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death"
    -- Abraham Lincoln, ridiculing Sen. Stephen Douglas's "Freeport doctrine" promise (aka "popular sovereignty") that, despite pro-slavery Federal judges and laws favored by Douglas's party, legislatures in new pre-Statehood "territories" could successfully ignore Federal demands to support slavery.
Lincoln's rebuttal, 6th Lincoln-Douglas debate, Quincy Illinois, 13 Oct 1858
As of 2007/09, the Lincoln Home National Historical Site had posted transcripts of the seven Lincoln-Dougles debates, eg:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/liho/debate6.htm
Added 20070905
Douglas enunciated the "popular sovereignty" doctrine at the second Lincoln-Douglas debate, Freeport Illinois, 27 August 1858.

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