“[On being told of Calvin Coolidge's death] How do they know? (Coolidge was well-known for being a man of very few words.)”

Quoted in Writers at Work 1st Series by Malcolm Cowley (1958)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "[On being told of Calvin Coolidge's death] How do they know? (Coolidge was well-known for being a man of very few words…" by Dorothy Parker?
Dorothy Parker photo
Dorothy Parker 172
American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist 1893–1967

Related quotes

Clarence Darrow photo

“Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

As quoted in Foundations of Democracy: A Series of Debates (1939) by Thomas Vernor Smith and Robert Alphonso Taft, p. 10

Calvin Coolidge photo

“Coolidge: Sins.
Mrs. Coolidge: Well, what did he say about it?
Coolidge: He was against it.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

when asked by his wife what a preacher's sermon had been about
John H. McKee, Coolidge: Wit and Wisdom, 1933
Author Nigel Rees claims this is apocryphal:
The taciturn President became famous for monosyllabic replies. A story from the twenties has Mrs. Coolidge asking him the subject of a sermon he had heard. "Sin," he answered. When prompted to elaborate on the clergyman's theme, Coolidge is said to have replied: "He was against it." Coolidge remarked that this story would have been funnier if it had been true.
Nigel Rees, Sayings of the Century, page 67.
Misattributed

Irene Dunne photo

“Like many New Englanders - he was a neighbor of Calvin Coolidge's in Northampton - he finds life a serious business. But he's never - well - heavy about it.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

about her husband, Dr. Francis Griffin Revealing The Life Of Irene Dunne, by Adele Whitely Fletcher; The Modern Screen (September 1933) http://www.irenedunnesite.com/press/modern-screen-september-1933/.

Stephen Leacock photo
Robert Fulghum photo

“I don't think the thing is to be well known, but being worth knowing.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Robert Fulghum : Philosopher King

Jane Taylor photo

“Though man a thinking being is defined,
Few use the grand prerogative of mind.
How few think justly of the thinking few!
How many never think, who think they do!”

Jane Taylor (1783–1824) British poet

"Essays in Rhyme" from On Morals and Manners, Prejudice, Essay i. Stanza 45, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Joe Satriani photo

“I pride myself on being incorrigible. I have a very hard time being told what to do.”

Joe Satriani (1956) American guitar player

As quoted in Guitar World (May 2000).

“All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others”

Sharon Salzberg (1952) American writer

Source: Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

John Gray photo

“Human beings act, certainly. But none of them knows why they act as they do. There is a scattering of facts, which can be known and reported. Beyond these facts are the stories that are told. Human beings may behave like puppets, but no one is pulling the strings.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

In The Puppet Theatre: Puppetry, Conspiracy and Ouija Boards (p. 136)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Isaac Newton photo

“I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all.”

Definitions - Scholium
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Context: I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common.

Related topics