Fun link, thanks!
Several I’ve never heard of, but I loved seeing that Minority Report* by H.L. Mencken is on the list. Too bad it wasn’t number 1. I read some quotes and kinda got a crush on him. Even if I don’t agree with everything he said, I admire his balls for saying it all. I wonder if it was on the way up or on the way down.
I also liked that Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren, Profiles In Courage by John F. Kennedy and The Birth of Britain by Winston Churchill are listed. As a Kate Bush fan it was fun to see something called “The Ninth Wave” on there too.
#1 Fiction: DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER William Brinkley
#1 Non-fiction: EISENHOWER Robert J. Donovan
(List in spoiler tags because I’m too lazy to clean the copy and paste up)
[spoiler]Fiction 1 DON’T GO NEAR THE WATER William Brinkley author info
Fiction 2 THE LAST HURRAH Edwin O’Connor author info
Fiction 3 THE MANDARINS Simone de Beauvoir author info
Fiction 4 A THING OF BEAUTY A.J. Cronin author info
Fiction 5 A SINGLE PEBBLE John Hersey author info
Fiction 6 ANDERSONVILLE MacKinlay Kantor author info
Fiction 7 AUNTIE MAME Patrick Dennis author info
Fiction 8 CHARMED CIRCLE Susan Ertz author info
Fiction 9 THE ROSEMARY TREE Elizabeth Goudge author info
Fiction 10 IMPERIAL WOMAN Pearl S. Buck author info
Fiction 11 THE NINTH WAVE Eugene Burdick author info
Fiction 12 THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW PATH Honor Tracy author info
Fiction 13 A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE Nelson Algren author info
Fiction 14 A CERTAIN SMILE Francoise Sagan author info
Fiction 15 PEMMICAN Vardis Fisher author info
Fiction 16 THE HALF-CROWN HOUSE Helen Ashton author info
Non-Fiction 1 EISENHOWER Robert J. Donovan author info
Non-Fiction 2 ARTHRITIS AND COMMON SENSE Dale Alexander author info
Non-Fiction 3 GUESTWARD HO! Patrick Dennis and Barbara Hooton author info
Non-Fiction 4 THE BIRTH OF BRITAIN Winston S. Churchill author info
Non-Fiction 5 PROFILES IN COURAGE John F. Kennedy author info
Non-Fiction 6 LOVE OR PERISH Smiley Blanton author info
Non-Fiction 7 HOW TO LIVE 365 DAYS A YEAR John A. Schindler author info
Non-Fiction 8 GIFT FROM THE SEA Anne Morrow Lindbergh author info
Non-Fiction 9 YOUTH Frances Ilg, Arnold Gesell and Louise Ames author info
Non-Fiction 10 NOBLESSE OBLIGE Nancy Mitford author info
Non-Fiction 11 MINORITY REPORT H.L. Mencken author info
Non-Fiction 12 THE AGE OF FIGHTING SAIL C.S. Forester author info
Non-Fiction 13 BAY WINDOW BOHEMIA Oscar Lewis author info
Non-Fiction 14 OLYMPIO Andre Maurois author info
Non-Fiction 15 THE MIND GOES FORTH H.A. Overstreet author info
Non-Fiction 16 GRAY FOX Burke Davis[/spoiler]
- Quotes from Minority Report:
[spoiler]“We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.”
“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable. To be sure, theology is always yielding a little to the progress of knowledge, and only a Holy Roller in the mountains of Tennessee would dare to preach today what the popes preached in the thirteenth century.”
“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”
“The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man – say a Tennessee Holy Roller – is really very small.”
“The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.”
“The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.”
“Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.”
“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.”
“The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.”
[/spoiler]
