“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
September 19, 1777, p. 351, often misquoted as being hanged in the morning.
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol III
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3
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Samuel Johnson 362
English writer 1709–1784Related quotes
“It concentrates the mind wonderfully knowing that this [life] is all we can expect.”
Short story, "The break", p.25
Short Stories, The Great Profundo and Other Stories (1987)
Source: The Well of Lost Plots
“Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) p. 1207.
Criticism
Source: I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.
Context: I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
“Depend upon it, Sir, nothing will come of them!”
On the coming of the railways, in The Birth of the Modern (1991), by Paul Johnson. p. 993.
“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with.”
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
