Playboy interview (2003)
Context: I think it's a very confused culture. On the one hand, no one is better than anyone else; no one is prettier. On the other hand, everyone is completely obsessed by their looks and by how they strike the world. On the one hand, we're all equal; on the other hand, everyone's a superstar. It's all very irrational, like all ideology.
Philosophy and Religion 1804)
“One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh.”
Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 218
Context: One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.
“Better one byrde in hand than ten in the wood.”
Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 296
“I gotta shake hands with himǃ That's one guy I know I'm better lookin' than.”
On Pirates manager Danny Murtaugh; as quoted in "The Village Smithyː Bobby Bragan Gets Good Seat To See 'My Boys' In Series; Yogi 'Better Looking' Than Danny" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=pMAbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=kU4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=2519%2C1822388 by Chester L. Smith, in The Pittsburgh Press (Wednesday, October 5, 1960), p. 53
Book I, Ch. 25
Essais (1595), Book I
Context: To call out for the hand of the enemy is a rather extreme measure, yet a better one, I think, than to remain in continual fever over an accident that has no remedy. But since all the precautions that a man can take are full of uneasiness and uncertainty, it is better to prepare with fine assurance for the worst that can happen, and derive some consolation from the fact that we are not sure that it will happen.
The dominant note is always horror. Society, apparently, cannot get along without capital punishment—for there are some people whom it is simply not safe to leave alive—and yet there is no one, when the pinch comes, who feels it right to kill another human being in cold blood. I watched a man hanged once. There was no question that everybody concerned knew this to be a dreadful, unnatural action. I believe it is always the same—the whole jail, warders and prisoners alike, is upset when there is an execution. It is probably the fact that capital punishment is accepted as necessary, and yet instinctively felt to be wrong, that gives so many descriptions of executions their tragic atmosphere. They are mostly written by people who have actually watched an execution and feel it to be a terrible and only partly comprehensible experience which they want to record; whereas battle literature is largely written by people who have never heard a gun go off and think of a battle as a sort of football match in which nobody gets hurt.
"As I Please" column in The Tribune (3 November 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/oocp/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)
