Andrew Lang Quotes (10 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Andrew Lang: 10 quotes1 like

Famous Andrew Lang Quotes

“Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.”

1910 Speech, quoted in Alan L. Mackay The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977), as reported in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (2005), p. 488.
Widely attributed to Lang (e.g. in Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford University Press; and in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Columbia University Press).
Variant: He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts—for support rather than illumination.

“O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.”

Andrew Lang

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”

Andrew Lang

Source: Adventures Among Books

“You can cover a great deal of country in books.”

Andrew Lang

“Among the various forms of science which are reaching and affecting the new popular tradition, we have reckoned Anthropology. Pleasantly enough, Anthropology has herself but recently emerged from that limbo of the unrecognised in which Psychical Research is pining.”

Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (1900) "[ Anthropology and Religion]", In: The Making of Religion, (Chapter II), Longmans, Green, and C°, London, New York and Bombay, 1900, pp. 39–64.

“They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.”

Andrew Lang

Sonnet The Odyssey (1879), in Introduction to his translation (with S. H. Butcher) of Homer's Odyssey.