“At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool.”
Menander (-342–-291 BC) Athenian playwright of New Comedy
Those Offered for Sale, fragment 421.
Quoted in The Algonquin Wits (1968) edited by Robert E. Drennan, and The Dispatch http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=r04cAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WFEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7250,5269688&dq=aside-lightly+dorothy-parker&hl=en (October 1962). As noted at Snopes, Drennan's source seems to be a Parker review which does not seem to contain this quote. If Parker wrote this statement anywhere the primary source seems to have gone missing. <br class="br">The earliest attribution of this quote was published in the February 1960 Readers' Digest, and credited to a book review by Sid Ziff in the Los Angeles Mirror-News, which existed from 1955 to 1960. This is a little odd, considering that Sid Ziff was a sports columnist; the reference in Readers' Digest has been confirmed but the quote from the Mirror-News has not - see Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/26/great-force/#more-5787 for details. <br class="br">Misattributed
“At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool.”
Menander (-342–-291 BC) Athenian playwright of New Comedy
Those Offered for Sale, fragment 421.
“If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”
Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator
Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 1, p. 21
Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature
“Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.”
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker
John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
The Vices of Morality: Immoral Amorality (p. 109)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)