“Stories only happen to people who can tell them.”
Variant: Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.
Page 169.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)
“Stories only happen to people who can tell them.”
Variant: Know something, sugar? Stories only happen to people who can tell them.
Patriotism, or Peace? http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism,_or_Peace%3F (1896), translated by Nathan Haskell Dole
Variant:
I have already several times expressed the thought that in our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling – should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men. Yet, strange to say – though it is undeniable that the universal armaments and destructive wars which are ruining the peoples result from that one feeling – all my arguments showing the backwardness, anachronism, and harmfulness of patriotism have been met, and are still met, either by silence, by intentional misinterpretation, or by a strange unvarying reply to the effect that only bad patriotism (Jingoism or Chauvinism) is evil, but that real good patriotism is a very elevated moral feeling, to condemn which is not only irrational but wicked.
What this real, good patriotism consists in, we are never told; or, if anything is said about it, instead of explanation we get declamatory, inflated phrases, or, finally, some other conception is substituted for patriotism – something which has nothing in common with the patriotism we all know, and from the results of which we all suffer so severely.
Patriotism and Government http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Government (1900)
Context: Tell people that war is an evil, and they will laugh; for who does not know it? Tell them that patriotism is an evil, and most of them will agree, but with a reservation. "Yes," they will say, "wrong patriotism is an evil; but there is another kind, the kind we hold." But just what this good patriotism is, no one explains.
“What will people say?”
“Who,” I asked, “is going to tell them?”
Source: The Probability Pad (1970), Chapter 2 (p. 12)
“It's not me who can't keep a secret. It's the people I tell that can't.”
“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
19 November 1745
Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)
"Talking Clothes" (p.109)
So This Is Depravity (1980)
Source: Girl, Interrupted (1994)