and that one must never enact a cause without
assuming full responsibility for its effects—
that one must never act like a zombie,
i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—
that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions
or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total,
integrated sum of one’s knowledge—
and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions.
This passage is longer than the quotations you’ve seen so far, but I wanted to make the point that some of history’s most powerful neverisms do not begin with the word never. For many intellectuals and others who wish to express themselves a bit more elegantly, one must never or one should never are commonly used phrases.
In the remainder of the book, you will find nearly 2,000 quotations that, to recall Willard Espy’s words from earlier, fall into the category of “Dissuasive advice given with authority.” Most of them will be 100 percent pure admonitions, but occasionally you will find some that contain both an exhortative and a dehortative component, as in these examples:
Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.CONFUCIUS
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.JOHN F. KENNEDY
Always take your work seriously, never yourself.DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, quoting an “old saying”
The book is organized into chapters on such topics as Wit & Wordplay, Politics & Government, Sports, Stage & Screen, and The Literary Life. By examining the Table of Contents, you will see that I have also given each chapter a neveristic title. I’ll begin each chapter with a few foundation-laying pages that I hope will engage your attention and whet your interest. After that, I will present a wide variety of quotations, alphabetically arranged by author, that fit within the theme of the chapter. If you wish to locate a quotation from a particular author, please consult the Author Index.
If you are familiar with my previous quotation anthologies, you will know that I often provide a bit of historical or contextual information about a quotation, and sometimes even offer some personal commentary. To use a popular current term, you might say that I enjoy telling the backstory on a quotation or its author. Several months ago, for example, I happened across what I regarded as an interesting, but not especially remarkable, quotation:
Never turn down a job because you think it’s too small;
you don’t know where it can lead.JULIA MORGAN
I had never heard of Julia Morgan, so I decided to do a little digging. What I found was fascinating. In 1894, she graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, the only female in her class. At the urging of a professor, she immediately headed off to Paris to study architecture at the famed École des Beaux-Arts. It took two frustrating years to gain admittance, though, as the school had never before admitted a woman. But Morgan persisted, and in 1902 she became the school’s first female graduate. After moving back to California, where she became the state’s first female architect, she almost immediately began to make a name for herself. A bell tower she designed in 1904 for Mills College in Oakland was the first reinforced-concrete structure to be built on the West Coast. When the tower remained standing after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Morgan’s reputation skyrocketed.
The backstory on the quotation is even more interesting. Morgan made her never turn down a job remark in 1918. A year later, in 1919, she was approached by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst about designing a small bungalow on a rustic property he owned midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He said to her:I would like to build something up on the hill at San Simeon. I get tired of going up there and camping in tents. I’m getting a little too old for that. I’d like to get something that would be a little more comfortable.
After a month of discussion, the architect and the magnate began to think more grandly about the project—which ultimately went on to occupy the next eighteen years of Morgan’s life! Today, Julia Morgan is best remembered as the designer of Hearst Castle, a luxurious 60,000-square-foot mansion with 56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, and 19 sitting rooms. Formally named La Cuesta Encantada (“The Enchanted Hill”), it is now a U.S. National Historic Landmark and one of California’s most popular tourist attractions. And it all happened because this pioneering female architect followed her own admonition about never turning down a job because it was too small.
During my research, background stories like this were repeated time and time again. I found them so interesting that I felt I would be shortchanging readers if I did not share at least some of them. As you approach this book, then, remember that it is not just an anthology of quotations; it is an anthology about quotations as well—and the often fascinating stories of the people who authored them.
In my search for neverisms, I have cast my net far and wide. As a result, you can expect to find almost all of the most popular and familiar neverisms in these pages. But you will also find many quotations that you have never seen before, as well as many that have never before appeared in a quotation collection. Despite my goal of comprehensiveness, though, I’m sure that many deserving quotations have eluded me. If you have a favorite that is not included, please feel free to e-mail it to me at: DrMGrothe@aol.com.
I also have a website (www.drmardy.com ) where you can delve even more deeply into the topic of neverisms, learn more about my other books, or sign up for my free weekly e-newsletter: Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week. I have striven for accuracy but am quite certain that I have made some mistakes. If you discover an error or would simply like to offer some feedback, please write to me in care of the publisher, or e-mail me at the address above. I hope you enjoy the book.
one
Never Go to a Doctor Whose Office Plants Have Died
Wit & Wordplay
In 1965, Dave Barry graduated from Pleasantville High School in New York, proud of having been voted “Class Clown” by his schoolmates. Later that year, he entered Haverford College—a small, prestigious liberal arts college near Philadelphia—where he majored in English, played lead guitar in a local rock band, and wrote a regular humor column for the college newspaper.
Barry avoided service in Vietnam after he was declared a conscientious objector. He did two years of alternative service before beginning his journalism career in 1971, when he became a general assignment reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania. After three years writing about town hall meetings, sewage plants, and zoning regulations, he gave up his dreams of a journalism career to work for a firm that taught writing skills to business executives. If anything, this new job was even more mind-numbing than his newspaper gig, but it paid better, and Barry worked at it for nearly eight years before declaring his efforts to improve executive prose “hopeless.”
In 1981, Barry wrote a guest humor column on natural childbirth for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The article somehow landed on the desk of Gene Weingarten, an editor at the Miami Herald. Years later, Weingarten recalled, “I read it and realized it was the first time in my life I had laughed out loud while reading the printed word.” Weingarten convinced his bosses to hire Barry to write a regular humor column for the Herald. Within a year, Barry had one of the fastest-growing syndicated columns in America. In 1988, five years after coming to the Herald, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, the only humorist to ever win journalism’s top award. Barry halted his weekly column-writing efforts in 2004, and has recently coauthored a number of fictional efforts with Ridley Pearson. Of his thirty books, though, Barry’s books of humor are my favorites, in large part because of his talent for finding humor in the most unexpected of places.