“What rage for fame attends both great and small!
Better be damned than mentioned not at all.”

— John Wolcot

To the Royal Academicians; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

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 "What rage for fame attends both great and small! Better be damned than mentioned not at all." by John Wolcot?

John Wolcot 5

English satirist 1738–1819

Related quotes

“What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Part Three, Ch. 11
Source: On the Road (1957)
Context: In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time. I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Café on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep. During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchements on me till I was unrecognizably caked. What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth? All in the mind.

“Tranquillity! thou better name
Than all the family of Fame.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Ode to Tranquillity
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“We are a sum total of what we have learned from all who have taught us, both great and small.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: understanding your potential discovering the hidden you

“The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations great or small — to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in "The Bolton Embarrassment" in The Nation (1 August 2005) http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=9416

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Archibald Stuart http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/skjolly/jeffersonianfederalism.pdf http://books.google.com/books?id=ZTIoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA837#v=onepage&q=&f=false, Philadelphia (23 December 1791)
1790s
Variant: I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Hence, ye profane! I hate ye all,
Both the great vulgar and the small.”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

Horace, book iii, Ode 1; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

“What is that sad, black island like a pall?
Why, Cytherea, famed in many a book,
The Eldorado of old-stagers. Look:
It's but a damned poor country after all!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Quelle est cette île triste et noire?
C'est Cythère,
Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre.
"Un Voyage à Cythère" [A Voyage to Cythera], lines 5-8, trans. Roy Campbell http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Un_Voyage_%C3%A0_Cyth%C3%A8re
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

“It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

“When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary, over-trading becomes a general error both among great and small dealers.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter I, p. 469.

“What rage for fame attends both great and small!Better be damned than mentioned not at all.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

John Wolcot 5

Related quotes

Related topics

“What rage for fame attends both great and small!
Better be damned than mentioned not at all.”