Twain finally rose to speak. What were his secrets to successful aging? The legendary humorist began by declaring his love of smoking and his abhorrence of exercise, saying, “I have achieved my seventy years . . . by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else.” He went on to say:
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep,
and never to refrain when awake.
A century ago, it was common for people to say I’ve made it a rule never to, but the use of such a phrase today is rare. It is a variation on the neverisms theme, though, and you will find a number of examples later in the book. Here are two more:
When I was younger,
I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch.
It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.WINSTON CHURCHILL, to King George VI,
said in 1952, when Churchill was seventy-seven years old
I’ve made it a rule never to drink by daylight
and never to refuse a drink after dark.H. L. MENCKEN
In another variation on the theme, people sometimes use the phrase one must never or one should never when offering principles of living or rules of conduct. As a general rule, these kinds of admonitions have a highfalutin quality, and they rarely pack the imperative punch of a straight-out neverism. But not always.
In a discussion of “Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Ayn Rand asserted that mankind’s basic virtue was rationality. It is, she said, the wellspring of all other virtues and the only truly responsible guide to life. By contrast, she argued that man’s basic vice—and the source of all evil—is irrationality, a rejection of reason. Irrationality is not ignorance, which is simply not knowing, or blindness, which is not seeing. Irrationality is something far more pernicious, she maintained, and far more dangerous. It is “a refusal to see” and “a refusal to know.” In describing what it means to guide one’s life by the virtue of rationality, Rand offered a compelling explanation (the italics in the passage are provided for emphasis and do not appear in the original text):
It means that one must never sacrifice one’s convictions
to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)—
that one must never attempt to fake reality
in any manner (which is the virtue of Honesty)—
that one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved,
neither in matter nor in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice).
It means that one must never desire effects without causes,
and that one must never enact a cause without
assuming full responsibility for its effects—
that one must never act like a zombie,
i.e., without knowing one’s own purposes and motives—
that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions
or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total,
integrated sum of one’s knowledge—
and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions.
This passage is longer than the quotations you’ve seen so far, but I wanted to make the point that some of history’s most powerful neverisms do not begin with the word never. For many intellectuals and others who wish to express themselves a bit more elegantly, one must never or one should never are commonly used phrases.
In the remainder of the book, you will find nearly 2,000 quotations that, to recall Willard Espy’s words from earlier, fall into the category of “Dissuasive advice given with authority.” Most of them will be 100 percent pure admonitions, but occasionally you will find some that contain both an exhortative and a dehortative component, as in these examples:
Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.CONFUCIUS
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.JOHN F. KENNEDY
Always take your work seriously, never yourself.DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, quoting an “old saying”
The book is organized into chapters on such topics as Wit & Wordplay, Politics & Government, Sports, Stage & Screen, and The Literary Life. By examining the Table of Contents, you will see that I have also given each chapter a neveristic title. I’ll begin each chapter with a few foundation-laying pages that I hope will engage your attention and whet your interest. After that, I will present a wide variety of quotations, alphabetically arranged by author, that fit within the theme of the chapter. If you wish to locate a quotation from a particular author, please consult the Author Index.
If you are familiar with my previous quotation anthologies, you will know that I often provide a bit of historical or contextual information about a quotation, and sometimes even offer some personal commentary. To use a popular current term, you might say that I enjoy telling the backstory on a quotation or its author. Several months ago, for example, I happened across what I regarded as an interesting, but not especially remarkable, quotation:
Never turn down a job because you think it’s too small;
you don’t know where it can lead.JULIA MORGAN
I had never heard of Julia Morgan, so I decided to do a little digging. What I found was fascinating. In 1894, she graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, the only female in her class. At the urging of a professor, she immediately headed off to Paris to study architecture at the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It took two frustrating years to gain admittance, though, as the school had never before admitted a woman. But Morgan persisted, and in 1902 she became the school’s first female graduate. After moving back to California, where she became the state’s first female architect, she almost immediately began to make a name for herself. A bell tower she designed in 1904 for Mills College in Oakland was the first reinforced-concrete structure to be built on the West Coast. When the tower remained standing after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Morgan’s reputation skyrocketed.
