Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
“It's hard not to play golf that's up to Jack Nicklaus standards when you are Jack Nicklaus.”
On winning his 70th PGA tournament, WINS Radio (May 28, 1984)
“No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master.”
"Democracy: Its Presumptions and Realities" (1932); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 99 - 100.
Extra-judicial writings
Context: When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream, as it were. I see children playing on the grass; their voices are shrill and discordant as children's are; they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with another, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.
“You have done your work, boys, and may go play, unless you will fall out among yourselves.”
Address to his Roundhead captors at the end of the Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold (1646) the last field battle of the First English Civil War.
Source: Hastings 1986, p. 135, citing C.V. Wedgwood
"Roller Coaster"
Song lyrics, Pretty Mess (2009)
“You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.”
From police transcripts of incoherent deathbed confession
“We'll play jacks and Uno cards
I'll be your best friend
And you'll be mine”
"Big Girls Don't Cry" (2006), from The Dutchess.
Source: One Minute Nonsense (1992), p. 96
("Leela" is more commonly spelled "Lila")
