“Never go to war with a noun. You will always lose.”

— John Green

"CC US History: The 1960 in America", referring to "War on Poverty", but also several later concepts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkXFb1sMa38&index=41&list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s <br class="br">YouTube

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 "Never go to war with a noun. You will always lose." by John Green?

John Green103

American author and vlogger 1977

Related quotes

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“Diversions come and go. Pleasure never lasts. Variety loses its meaning. But you will always be able to choose what you are willing to sacrifice, what you are willing to give up.”

Mark Manson book Everything Is Fucked

“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“I lock eyes with my reflection and don’t look away. The day you look away you start to lose yourself. I’m never going to lose myself. You are what you are. Deal with it or change.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Iced

“No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Notes on the Next War (1935)
Context: Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness: but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.