“When good Americans die, they go to Paris"
"Where do bad Americans go?"
"They stay in America”
Act I.
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Context: Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
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Oscar Wilde 812
Irish writer and poet 1854–1900Related quotes
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”
Quoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), ch. 6.
“I wonder where we go when we die?”
“…Pittsburgh?”
“You mean if we’re good or if we’re bad?”
Holmes attributed the remark "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris" to "one of the wittiest of men". Later writers have attributed the saying to friend and fellow Saturday Club member Thomas Gold Appleton. In 1859, Ralph Waldo Emerson, also a member of that club, recorded in one of his journals, "T. Appleton says, that he thinks all Bostonians, when they die, if they are good, go to Paris." Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (1982), p. 486. Neither sentence has been found in the published writings of Appleton, but the remark may have been made in the presence of Holmes and Emerson. Oscar Wilde used the Holmes version in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), p. 75 (Complete Works, vol. 4, 1923), and A Woman of No Importance (1893), p. 180 (Complete Works, vol. 7, 1923).
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
“Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach.”
Source: reaction to Churchill's pitch at the Cairo Conference in November 1943 for the Americans to join in an assault on Rhodes. quoted by Correl, John T. “Churchill’s Southern Strategy.” Air Force Magazine, January 2013 https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0113churchill/
Before the Invasion of Iraq, BBC News (April 24, 2003), "Tariq Aziz in U.S. Custody; New York Moves Closer to Rebuilding at Ground Zero" http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0304/24/se.00.html.
2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)
"Bush's America: 100 Percent Al-Qaida Free Since 2001" (11 June 2008) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=256.
2008