Favorite literary diatribes

Cafe Society
1

What is your favorite diatribe from literature? Here are two of mine:

  1. Big Kahuna–Kevin Spacey’s speech about what you say when someone is lying to you.

  2. Glengary Glen Ross-- Alec Baldwin’s speech to the sales staff. “Coffee is for closers.”

2

Since when are movies literature?

3

Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, written the the master (no, not Cecil. The other master.)

Not only hilarious, but pretty damn good writing advice.

4

You are right, of course.

5

I’ve always been a fan of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, though I don’t know if it necessarily counts as a diatribe.

6

James Thurber’s “What’s so Funny?”
Or (depending on how loosely you define “diatribe”) George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Langauge”.

7

Yossarian’s “And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways… There’s nothing so mysterious about it…” speech from Catch-22.