Paul Theroux book The Kingdom by the Sea
The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain, ch. 1 (1983).
“The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or dinner-table was that So-and-So "is quite mad." It was no offence to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English society as well as its chief terror.”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
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journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918Related quotes
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector
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“The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
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Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936) Puerto Rican playwright and novelist
On some people’s resistance to reading English literature in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00096005/00024/14j (Sargasso, 1984)
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer
"Dawn Powell: The American Writer" (1987)
1980s, At Home (1988)
“A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.”
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
“People like eccentrics and they will therefore leave me alone, saying that I am a "mad clown."”
Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950) Russian ballet dancer and choreographer
As quoted in Vaslav Nijinsky : A Leap into Madness by Peter F. Ostwald, Ch. 8: Playing the Role of a Madman, p. 176
Unsourced variant: I know everyone will say "Nijinsky has gone mad," but I don’t care because I have already played the mad man at home. That is what everyone will think, but they won’t put me in an insane asylum because I dance very well and give money to anyone who asks. People like eccentrics, so they will leave me alone and say I’m a mad clown. I like the mentally ill because I know how to talk to them. When my brother was in an insane asylum, I loved him and he could feel me. His friends liked me. I was eighteen then. I understood the life of a mentally ill person.
John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 5, Strategies for Survival, p. 144