A garland of quotations LXXI
Culled from the finest beginners in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
Arthur G. Hays: I do not think either of them are at all dangerous.
Richard M. Nixon: In other words, the Socialists and Communists are just as dangerous.
Hays: No; I do not say anything of the kind.
Nixon: Then what do you say?
Hays: I said that since I regard neither of them as at all dangerous, I think one is as dangerous as the other.
Nixon: Then you do say that one is as dangerous as the other.
Hays: Like zero is as to zero.
•HUAC hearings, 1948.
What would happen if we took everything that exists in the universe, and divided it by one? I’ll tell you. It would remain the same. So, therefore, how do we know that someone isn’t doing that right now, at this very instant? It makes me shudder to think of it. We might be constantly divided by one, or multiplied by one for that matter, and we wouldn’t even know it!
•Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale (1983).
The only real number is one, the others are mere repetition.
•Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).
But why do we always want to grow, to climb uphill from one to a thousand, when the downward path— from one to zero—is faster and sweeter? •Nabokov, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn (1924).
On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb.
•Borges, Doctor Brodie’s Report (1970).
One implies one, but two implies an infinity, as can be proved by mirrors.
•some schmuck, “Fifteen Short Pieces” (2023).
School taught one and one is two.
But right now, that answer just ain't true
•The Moody Blues, “Ride My See-Saw” (1968).
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
•Orwell, 1984 (1949).
To think that two and two are four And neither five nor three The heart of man has long been sore And long ’tis like to be. •Housman, “When first my way to fair I took” (1922).
And slowly, as the transmutations of nature of sunset or sunrise are without the catastrophe of lesser changes, it was, as he looked, that three were subsumed to one.
•Eddison, Mistress of Mistresses (1935).
If three men converse in secret, He is the fourth; if five, He is the sixth.
•Quran 58:7.
Not one, not two, not three or four, but through eighty-four hundred thousand vaginas have I come, I have come through unlikely worlds, guzzled on pleasure and on pain. Whatever be all previous lives, show me mercy this one day, O Lord white as jasmine. •Mahādēviyakka, vacana 18 (C12).
References: HUAC: quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon vol. 1: The Education of a Politician 1913–1962 (Simon & Schuster, 1987); Borges: trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Doctor Brodie’s Report (Dutton, 1972); Moodies: In Search of the Lost Chord (1968); Housman: Last Poems (Grant Richards, 1922); Quran: trans. N.J. Dawood (Penguin, 1995); Mahādēviyakka: in A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Penguin, 1973); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.