“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”

Quoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), ch. 6.

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Thomas Gold Appleton 1
American artist 1812–1884

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Oscar Wilde photo
Oscar Wilde photo

“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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“There is that glorious Epicurean paradox uttered by my friend the Historian, in one of his flashing moments: "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries." To this must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men: "Good Americans when they die go to Paris."”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

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)

George Marshall photo

“Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

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/

François Andrieux photo

“To die in Paris costs a pretty penny.”

François Andrieux (1759–1833) French man of letters and playwright

Il en coûte bien cher pour mourir à Paris.
Les Etourdis, Act I., Sc. II. — (Daiglemoni).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 56.

Euripidés photo

“When good men die their goodness does not perish,
But lives though they are gone.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Temenidæ Frag. 734
Context: When good men die their goodness does not perish,
But lives though they are gone. As for the bad,
All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.

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