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Jonathan Edwards (theologian)

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 – March 22, 1758) was a colonial American Congregational preacher and theologian.

Quotes

 * Intend to live in continual mortification, and never to expect or desire any worldly ease or pleasure.
 * Diary (1723).

 * There is, therefore, no difficulty in answering such questions as these. What cause was there why the Universe was placed in such a part of Space? and, Why was the Universe created at such a Time? for, if there be no Space beyond the Universe, it was impossible that it should be created in another place; and if there was no Time before, it was impossible it should be created at another time.
 * The Mind (begun in September 1723; not completed).

 * They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight; and that she hardly cares for any thing, except to meditate on him— that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do any thing wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.
 * Written in 1723; from The Works of President Edwards, vol. I, ed. Sereno B. Dwight, 1830.
 * The young woman described here was Sarah Pierrepont, who became Edwards' wife in 1727.

 * When I am giving the relation of a thing, remember to abstain from altering either in the matter or manner of speaking, so much, as that, if every one, afterwards, should alter as much, it would at last come to be properly false.
 * Diary (7 July 1724).

 * To mark all that I say in conversation, merely to beget in others, a good opinion of myself, and examine it.
 * Diary (10 November 1724).

 * The beauty of the world consists wholly of sweet mutual consents, either within itself or with the supreme being.
 * "The Beauty of the World" (c.1725), from the notebook The Images of Divine Things, The Shadows of Divine Things, The Language and Lessons of Nature (published 1948).

 * Almost all men, and those that seem to be very miserable, love life, because they cannot bear to lose sight of such a beautiful and lovely world. The ideas, that every moment whilst we live have a beauty that we take not distinct notice of, brings a pleasure that, when we come to the trial, we had rather live in much pain and misery than lose.
 * "The Beauty of the World" (c.1725), from the notebook The Images of Divine Things, The Shadows of Divine Things, The Language and Lessons of Nature (published 1948).

 * A little, wretched, despicable creature; a worm, a mere nothing, and less than nothing; a vile insect that has risen up in contempt against the majesty of Heaven and earth.
 * The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners (1734).

 * I often used to sit and view the moon for a long time; and in the day spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the mean time, singing forth, with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. And scarce any thing, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunder-storm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, if I may so speak, at the first appearance of a thunderstorm; and used to take the opportunity, at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God's thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural for me to sing, or chant forth my meditations; or to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice.
 * "Personal Narrative" (1739), from The Works of President Edwards (1830) Vol. I, edited by Sereno B. Dwight.

 * The soul of a true christian, as I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun.
 * "Personal Narrative" (1739), from The Works of President Edwards (1830) Vol. I, edited by Sereno B. Dwight.

 * Now shall the promises made to Christ by God the Father before the foundation of the world, the promises of the covenant of redemption, be fully accomplished. Christ shall now have perfectly obtained the joy set before Him, for which He undertook those great sufferings in His state of humiliation. Now shall all the hopes and expectations of the saints be fulfilled. The state of the church before was progressive and preparatory; but now she is arrived at her most perfect state of glory. All the glory of the church on earth is but a faint shadow of this her consummate glory in heaven.
 * A History of the Work of Redemption including a View of Church History (1839).

 * There are two sorts of hypocrites: one that are deceived with their outward morality and external religion; many of which are professed Arminians, in the doctrine of justification: and the other, are those that are deceived with false discoveries and elevations; which often cry down works, and men's own righteousness, and talk much of free grace; but at the same time make a righteousness of their discoveries, and of their humiliation, and exalt themselves to heaven with them. These two kinds of hypocrites, Mr. Shepard, in his Exposition of the Parable of the Ten Virgins, distinguishes by the names of legal and evangelical hypocrites; and often speaks of the latter as the worst. And it is evident that the latter are commonly by far the most confident in their hope, and with the most difficulty brought off from it: I have scarcely known the instance of such a one, in my life, that has been undeceived.
 * Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), PART II : Showing What Are No Certain Signs That Religious Affections Are Truly Gracious, Or That They Are Not, Ch. 11: Nothing can be certainly known of the nature of Religious Affections, that they much dispose persons with their mouths to praise and glorify God.

 * I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause.
 * The Freedom of the Will (1754).

 * This dictate of common sense.
 * The Freedom of the Will (1754).

 * Remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.
 * Letter to Deborah Hatheway (1741), in Letters and Personal Writings (1998), edited by George S. Claghorn, Vol. 16.

 * In the text we have an account how this future glorious advancement of the church of God should be introduced; viz. By great multitudes in different towns and countries taking up a joint resolution, and coming into an express and visible agreement, that they will, by united and extraordinary prayer, seek to God, that he would come and manifest himself, and grant the tokens and fruits of his gracious presence.
 * It is evident from the Scripture, that there is yet remaining a great advancement of the interest of religion and the kingdom of Christ in this world, by an abundant outpouring of the Spirit of God, far greater and more extensive than ever yet has been. It is certain, that many things, which are spoken concerning a glorious time of the church’s enlargement and prosperity in the latter days, have never yet been fulfilled.
 * An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For The Revival Of Religion And The Advancement Of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth from Edwards, Jonathan, The works of Jonathan Edwards (Vol. 2, p. 278). Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1974.

Seventy Resolutions (1722-1723)

 * Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration, without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriad's of ages hence. Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general. Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.
 * No. 1.

 * Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.
 * No. 5.

 * Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.
 * No. 6.

 * Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.
 * No. 7.

 * Resolved, never to do anything out of revenge.
 * No. 14.

 * Resolved, never to speak evil of anyone, so that it shall tend to his dishonor, more or less, upon no account except for some real good.
 * No. 16.

 * Resolved, never to count that a prayer, nor to let that pass as a prayer, nor that as a petition of a prayer, which is so made, that I cannot hope that God will answer it; nor that as a confession, which I cannot hope God will accept.
 * No. 29.

 * Resolved, to ask myself at the end of every day, week, month and year, wherein I could possibly in any respect have done better.
 * No. 41.

 * Resolved, to confess frankly to myself all that which I find in myself, either infirmity or sin; and, if it be what concerns religion, also to confess the whole case to God, and implore needed help.
 * No. 68.

 * Resolved, always to do that, which I shall wish I had done when I see others do it.
 * No. 69.

Justification By Faith Alone (1738)

 * As published in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (1834), Vol. 1, Ch. XIV Five discourses on the soul's eternal salvation., DISCOURSE I : Justification by Faith Alone ("delivered at Northampton, chiefly at the time of the late wonderful pouring out of the spirit of God there.")

 * A person is said to be justified, when he is approved of God as free from the guilt of sin and its deserved punishment, and as having that righteousness belonging to him that entitles to the reward of life. That we should take the word in such a sense, and understand it as the judge’s accepting a person as having both a negative and positive righteousness belonging to him, and looking on him therefore as not only free from any obligation to punishment, but also as just and righteous, and so entitled to a positive reward, is not only most agreeable to the etymology and natural import of the word, which signifies to pass one for righteousness in judgment, but also manifestly agreeable to the force of the word as used in Scripture.

 * The apostle Paul is abundant in teaching, that 'we are justified by faith alone, without the works of the law!' There is no one doctrine that he insists so much upon, and that he handles with so much distinctness, explaining, giving reasons, and answering objections.

 * Some that oppose this doctrine indeed say, that the apostle sometimes means that it is by faith, i.e. a hearty embracing the gospel in its first act only, or without any preceding holy life, that persons are admitted into a justified state; but, say they, it is by a persevering obedience that they are continued in a justified state, and it is by this that they are finally justified. But this is the same thing as to say, that a man on his first embracing the gospel is conditionally justified and pardoned. To pardon sin, is to free the sinner from the punishment of it, or from that eternal misery that is due to it; and therefore if a person is pardoned, or freed from this misery, on his first embracing the gospel, and yet not finally freed, but his actual freedom still depends on some condition yet to be performed, it is inconceivable how he can be pardoned otherwise than conditionally; that is, he is not properly actually pardoned, and freed from punishment, but only he has God’s promise that he shall be pardoned on future conditions. God promises him, that now, if he perseveres in obedience, he shall be finally pardoned, or actually freed from hell; which is to make just nothing at all of the apostle’s great doctrine of justification by faith alone. Such a conditional pardon is no pardon or justification at all, any more than all mankind have, whether they embrace the gospel or no; for they all have a promise of final justification on conditions of future sincere obedience, as much as he that embraces the gospel.

 * "But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." -Romans iv. 5. The following things may be noted in this verse:...That justification respects a man as ungodly. This is evident by these words,—that justifieth the ungodly; which cannot imply less, than that God, in the act of justification, has no regard to any thing in the person justified, as godliness, or any goodness in him; but that immediately before this act, God beholds him only as an ungodly creature...

 * If Adam had finished his course of perfect obedience, he would have been justified: and certainly his justification would have implied something more than what is merely negative; he would have been approved of, as having fulfilled the righteousness of the law, and accordingly would have been adjudged to the reward of it. So Christ, our second surety, (in whose justification all whose surety he is, are virtually justified,) was not justified till he had done the work the Father had appointed him, and kept the Father’s commandments through all trials; and then in his resurrection he was justified. When he had been put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit, 1 Pet. iii. 18. then he that was manifest in the flesh was justified in the spirit, 1 Tim. iii. 16.; but God, when he justified him in raising him from the dead, did not only release him from his humiliation for sin, and acquit him from any further suffering or abasement for it, but admitted him to that eternal and immortal life, and to the beginning of that exaltation that was the reward of what he had done. And indeed the justification of a believer is no other than his being admitted to communion in the justification of this head and surety of all believers; for as Christ suffered the punishment of sin, not as a private person, but as our surety; so when after this suffering he was raised from the dead, he was therein justified, not as a private person, but as the surety and representative of all that should believe in him. So that he was raised again not only for his own, but also for our justification, according to the apostle, Rom. iv. 25. “Who was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our justification.” And therefore it is that the apostle says, as he does in Rom. viii. 34. “Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again.

 * When it is said, that we are not justified by any righteousness or goodness of our own, what is meant is, that it is not out of respect to the excellency or goodness of any qualifications or acts in us whatsoever, that God judges it meet that this benefit of Christ should be ours; and it is not, in any wise, on account of any excellency or value that there is in faith, that it appears in the sight of God a meet thing, that he who believes should have this benefit of Christ assigned to him, but purely from the relation faith has to the person in whom this benefit is to be had, or as it unites to that mediator, in and by whom we are justified.

 * Eph. i.6. "Who hath made us accepted in the beloved.” Our being in him is the ground or our being accepted. So it is in those unions to which the Holy Ghost has thought fit to compare this. The union of the members of the body with the head, is the ground of their partaking of the life of the head; it is the union of the branches to the stock, which is the ground of their partaking of the sap and life of the stock; it is the relation of the wife to the husband, that is the ground of her joint interest in his estate; they are looked upon, in several respects, as one in law. So there is a legal union between Christ and true Christians; so that (as all except Socinians allow) one, in some respects, is accepted for the other by the Supreme Judge.(Edwards writes later in the sermon... "What is real in the union between Christ and his people, is the foundation of what is legal; that is, it is something really in them, and between them, uniting them, that is the ground of the suitableness of their being accounted as one by the Judge.")

 * As there is nobody but what will allow that there is a peculiar relation between Christ and his true disciples, by which they are in some sense in Scripture said to be one so I suppose there is nobody but what will allow, that there may be something that the true Christian does on his part, whereby he is active in coming into this relation or union; some uniting act, or that which is done towards this union or relation (or whatever any please to call it) on the Christian’s part. Now faith I suppose to be this act.

 * I do not now pretend to define justifying faith, or to determine precisely how much is contained in it, but only to determine thus much concerning it, viz. That it is that by which the soul, which before was separate and alienated from Christ, unites itself to him, or ceases to be any longer in that state of alienation, and comes into that forementioned union or relation to him; or to use the scripture phrase, it is that by which the soul comes to Christ, and receives him; and this is evident by the Scriptures using these very expressions to signify faith. John vi. 35-39. 'He that cometh to me, shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me, shall never thirst...'"
 * Edwards later writes in this sermon... "The entire active uniting of the soul, or the whole of what is called coming to Christ, and receiving of him, is called faith in Scripture..."

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741)

 * Sermon delivered in Enfield, Connecticut (8 July 1741)

 * The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow.

 * The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

 * Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and switfly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a fallen rock.

 * You have reason to wonder that you are not already in hell.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

 * All the virtues which appeared in Christ shone brightest in the close of His life, under the trials He then met. Eminent virtue always shows brightest in the fire. Pure gold shows its purity chiefly in the furnace. It was chiefly under those trials which Christ endured in the close of His life, that His love to God, His honor of God's majesty, His regard to the honor of His law, His spirit of obedience, His humility, contempt of the world, His patience, meekness, and spirit of forgiveness towards men, appeared. Indeed, every thing that Christ did to work out redemption for us appears mainly in the close of His life. Here mainly is His satisfaction for sin, and here chiefly is His merit of eternal life for sinners, and here chiefly appears the brightness of His example which He has set us for imitation.
 * p. 67.

 * A greater absurdity cannot be thought of than a morose, hard-hearted, covetous, proud, malicious Christian.
 * p. 106.

 * All the graces of Christianity always go together. They so go together that where there is one, there are all, and where one is wanting, all are wanting. Where there is faith, there are love, and hope, and humility; and where there is love, there is also trust; and where there is a holy trust in God, there is love to God; and where there is a gracious hope, there also is a holy fear of God.
 * p. 119.

 * What tranquillity will there be in heaven! Who can express the fullness and blessedness of this peace! What a calm is this! How sweet and holy and joyous! What a haven of rest to enter, after having passed through the storms and tempests of this world, in which pride and selfishness and envy and malice and scorn and contempt and contention and vice are as waves of a restless ocean, always rolling, and often dashed about in violence and fury! What a Canaan of rest to come to, after going through this waste and howling wilderness, full of snares and pitfalls and poisonous serpents, where no rest could be found.
 * p. 302.

 * Every Christian that goes before us from this world is a ransomed spirit waiting to welcome us in heaven.
 * p. 304.

 * Confess your nothingness and ill-desert before God. Distrust yourself. Rely only upon God. Renounce all glory except from Him. Yield yourself heartily to His will and service. Avoid an aspiring, ambitious, ostentatious, assuming, arrogant, scornful, stubborn, willful, levelling, self-justifying behavior; and strive for more and more of the humble spirit that Christ manifested while He was here upon earth.
 * p. 331.

 * Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."
 * p. 396.

 * Consider that as a principle of love is the main principle in the heart of a real Christian, so the labor of love, is the main business of the Christian life.
 * p. 396.

 * By Christ's purchasing redemption, two things are intended, His satisfaction, and His merit. All is done by the price that Christ lays down, which does two things: it pays our debt, and so it satisfies; by its intrinsic value, and by the agreement between the Father and the Son it procures our title, and so it merits. The satisfaction of Christ is to free us from misery, and the merit of Christ is to purchase happiness for us.
 * p. 489.

 * Whatever in Christ had the nature of satisfaction, was by virtue of His suffering or humiliation; whatever had the nature of merit, was by virtue of His obedience or righteousness.
 * p. 489.

 * As God carries on the work of converting the souls of fallen men through all ages, so He goes on to justify them, to blot out all their sins, and to accept them as righteous in His sight through the righteousness of Christ. He goes on to adopt and receive them from being the children of Satan to be His own children, to carry on the work of His grace which He has begun in them, to comfort them with the consolations of His Spirit, and to bestow upon them, when their bodies die, that eternal glory which is the fruit of Christ's purchase.
 * p. 489.

 * How great is your sin in rejecting Jesus Christ! You slight the glorious Person for whose coming God made such great preparation in such a series of wonderful providences from the beginning of the world, bringing to pass a thing before unknown, the union of the Divine nature with the human in one person. You have been guilty of slighting that great Saviour, who, after such preparation, actually accomplished the purchase of redemption, and who, after He had spent three or four and thirty years in poverty, labor, and contempt, in purchasing redemption, at last finished the purchase by closing His life under such extreme sufferings; and so by His death, and continuing for a time under the power of death, completed the whole. This is the Saviour you reject and despise. You make light of all the glory of His person, and of all the love of God the Father in sending Him into the world, and all His wonderful love appearing in the whole of His work.
 * p. 492.

 * Religion, in its purity, is not so much a pursuit as a temper; or rather it is a temper, leading to the pursuit of all that is high and holy. Its foundation is faith; its action, works; its temper, holiness; its aim, obedience to God in improvement of self, and benevolence to men.
 * p. 494.

 * Holy practice is the most decisive evidence of the reality of our repentance. "Bring forth fruits meet for repentance."
 * p. 509.

 * If you seek in the spirit of selfishness, to grasp all as your own, you shall lose all, and be driven out of the world, at last, naked and forlorn, to everlasting poverty and contempt.
 * p. 538.

 * If there be ground for you to trust, as you do, in your own righteousness, then all that Christ did to purchase salvation, and all that God did from the fall of man to prepare the way for it, is in vain. Consider what greater folly could you have devised to charge upon God than this, that all those things were done so needlessly; when, instead of all this, He might only have called you forth, and committed the business to you, which you think you can do so easily.
 * p. 540.

 * What self-righteous persons take to themselves, is the same work that Christ was engaged in when He was in His agony and bloody sweat, and when He died on the cross, which was the greatest thing that ever the eyes of angels beheld. Christ could accomplish other parts of this work without cost; but this part cost Him His life, as well as innumerable pains and labors. Yet this is the part which self-righteous persons go about to accomplish for themselves.
 * p. 541.

 * You trust in your own doings to appease God for your sins, and to incline the heart of God to you. Though you are poor, worthless, vile, and polluted, yet you arrogantly take upon you that very work for which the Son of God became man; and in order to which God employed four thousand years in all the great dispensations of His providence, aiming chiefly to make way for Christ's coming to do this work. This is the work that you foolishly think yourselves sufficient for; as though your prayers and performances were excellent enough for this purpose. Consider how vain is the thought which you entertain of yourself. How must such arrogance appear in the sight of Christ, whom it cost so much? It was not to be obtained even by Him, so great and glorious a person, at a cheaper rate than His wading through a sea of blood, and passing through the midst of the furnace of God's wrath.
 * p. 541.

 * You that trust in your own righteousness, arrogate to yourselves the honor of the greatest thing that even God Himself ever did. You seem not only sufficient to perform Divine works, but such is your pride and vanity, that you are not content without taking upon you to do the very greatest work that ever God Himself wrought. God's works of providence are greater than those of creation. To take on yourself to work out redemption, is a greater thing than if you had taken it upon you to create a world.
 * p. 542.

 * Christian practice is that evidence which confirms every other indication of true godliness.
 * p. 619.

Quotes about Jonathan Edwards

 * Suppose Jonathan Edwards had been born a woman; suppose William James, for that matter, had been born a woman? (The invalid seclusion of his sister Alice is suggestive.) Even from men, New England took its psychic toll; many of its geniuses seemed peculiar in one way or another, particularly along the lines of social intercourse...Emily Dickinson-viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as "partially cracked," by the twentieth century as fey or pathological-has increasingly struck me as a practical woman, exercising her gift as she had to, making choices.
 * Adrienne Rich On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979)

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William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

The Right Honourable  William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (15 November 1708 – 11 May 1778) was a British Whig statesman who achieved his greatest fame as war minister during the Seven Years' War (aka French and Indian War) and who was later Prime Minister of Great Britain. He is often known as William Pitt the Elder to distinguish him from his son, William Pitt the Younger

1730s

 * When trade is at stake, it is your last entrenchment; you must defend it, or perish...Sir, Spain knows the consequence of a war in America; whoever gains, it must prove fatal to her...is this any longer a nation? Is this any longer an English Parliament, if with more ships in your harbours than in all the navies of Europe; with above two millions of people in your American colonies, you will bear to hear of the expediency of receiving from Spain an insecure, unsatisfactory, dishonourable Convention?
 * Denouncing the Spanish Convention of Pardo in the House of Commons (6 March 1739), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), pp. 6-7

 * It must cut up Liberty by the root and poison the Fountain of Publick Security; and who that has an English heart can ever be weary of asserting Liberty?
 * Denouncing corruption in a draft speech (November 1739), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume I (1913), p. 80

1740s

 * We are now to examine whether it is probable that we shall preserve our commerce and our independence, or whether we are sinking into subjection to a foreign power.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (26 January 1741), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume I (1913), p. 82

 * Our seamen have always been famous for a matchless alacrity and intrepidity in time of danger; this has saved many a British ship, when other seamen would have run below deck, and left the ship to the mercy of the waves, or, perhaps, of a more cruel enemy, a pirate.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (6 March 1741), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), p. 10

1750s

 * I rejoice to hear that you have begun Homer's Iliad; and have made so great a progress in Virgil. I hope you taste and love those authors particularly. You cannot read them too much: they are not only the two greatest poets, but they contain the finest lessons for your age to imbibe: lessons of honour, courage, disinterestedness, love of truth, command of temper, gentleness of behaviour, humanity, and in one word, virtue in its true significance.
 * Letter to his nephew, Thomas Pitt (12 October 1751), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Vol. I (1838), pp. 62–63

 * Substitute Tully and Demosthenes in the place of Homer and Virgil; and arm yourself with all the variety of manner, copiousness and beauty of diction, nobleness and magnificence of ideas of the Roman consul; and render the powers of eloquence complete by the irresistible torrent of vehement argumentation, and close and forcible reasoning, and the depth and fortitude of mind of the Grecian statesman.
 * Letter to his nephew, Thomas Pitt (31 January 1756), quoted in Letters Written by the late Earl of Chatham to His Nephew Thomas Pitt, Esq. (1805), pp. 89-89

 * My Lord, I am sure I can save this country, and no one else can.
 * Remark to the Duke of Devonshire in 1756, quoted in Horace Walpole, Memoirs of King George II (1985), III, p. 1

 * A gloomy scene for this distressed, disgraced country.
 * Remark on the state of affairs (June 1757), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume I (1913), p. 337

 * ...the day is come when the very inadequate benefits of the treaty of Utrecht, the indelible reproach of the last generation, are become the necessary, but almost unattainable wish of the present, when the empire is no more, the ports of the Netherlands betrayed, the Dutch Barrier treaty an empty sound, Minorca, and with it, the Mediterranean lost, and America itself precarious.
 * Letter to Benjamin Keene (23 August 1757), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Vol. I (1838), p. 251

 * The only way to have peace is to prepare for war.
 * To the Duke of Newcastle (c. August 1758), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume I (1913), p. 379

1760s

 * [Pitt] said he could not allow what I said; that either we were in a situation to receive the law or to give it; that he thought the latter was our case; that therefore it was our business to propose the terms and tell France on what conditions they were to have peace; that it was so at the Peace of Utrecht and it would be absurd to act otherways.
 * Quoted in the Duke of Devonshire's diary (22 April 1761), Peter D. Brown and Karl W. Schweizer (eds.), The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire. Memoranda on State Affairs. 1759–1762 (1982), p. 95

 * [Pitt] said he would not come into it; that he thought this country in a situation to give peace to France, and if we were at first firm in our proceedings and did not yield to France, we should soon have a very good peace.
 * Remarks to the Council (27 April 1761), quoted in Peter D. Brown and Karl W. Schweizer (eds.), The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire. Memoranda on State Affairs. 1759–1762 (1982), p. 97

 * Pitt complained that we lay inactive, while the French pushed on their conquests.
 * Remarks to the Council (14 July 1761), quoted in Peter D. Brown and Karl W. Schweizer (eds.), The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire. Memoranda on State Affairs. 1759–1762 (1982), p. 101

 * [Pitt said] he saw combinations of great Lords against him but for his part he would go his own way; that he was a British subject and he knew he stood upon British ground; that he had learnt his maxims and principles under the great Lord Cobham and the disciples of the greatest lawyers, generals and patriots of King William's days: named Lord Somers and the Duke of Marlborough.
 * Remarks to the Council (14 August 1761), quoted in Peter D. Brown and Karl W. Schweizer (eds.), The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire. Memoranda on State Affairs. 1759–1762 (1982), p. 111

 * [Pitt] said that he saw so many Lords great in themselves and in their influence in the House of Commons, differing so much in opinion from him, and inclined to make concessions for the sake of peace than he could come into; that it was impossible for him to remain; that for the sake of unanimity he had gone as far as his conscience and even his sleep would permit him.
 * Remarks to the Council (10 September 1761), quoted in Peter D. Brown and Karl W. Schweizer (eds.), The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire. Memoranda on State Affairs. 1759–1762 (1982), p. 119

 * This unjust and unexampled proceeding of the Court of Spain, by inforcing her demands on England through the channel and by the compulsion of a hostile power, denouncing eventually future war in conjunction, while Spain was still professing amity and friendship with Great Britain; and the full declaration and avowal at last made by the Spanish Ministry of a total union of councils and interests between the two monarchies of the House of Bourbon, are matters of so high and urgent a nature as call indispensably on His Majesty to take forthwith such necessary and timely measures as God has put into his hands, for the defence of the honour of his Crown, and of the just and essential interests of His Majesty's people.
 * Memorial to the King and the Cabinet signed jointly with Richard Temple (18 September 1761), quoted in William James Smith (ed.), The Grenville Papers: Being the Correspondence of Richard Grenville Earl Temple, K.G., and The Right Hon. George Grenville, Their Friends and Contemporaries: Vol. I (1852), p. 386

 * No doubt with me that Spain is France [more] than that the Isle of France is, a union in the House of Bourbon; loss of time loss of opportunity. Whatever is dangerous will be more so 6 months hence; no safety but acting with vigour. Procrastination will increase the danger. The fact is proved, the treatment we have had shews what we are to expect. The question is that France and Spain are joined: what is to be done? ... I am still of opinion that an immediate action gives us the best chance to extricate ourselves. Acquiesced in their partiality till such time as we had broke the force of France, wishing then that Spain would give us an opportunity to punish them. Best chance to order Lord Bristol away and your fleets to take every Spanish flag. If the means to do this are doubtful will it not be more so next spring. I am for it now.
 * Remarks to the Council (18 September 1761), quoted in Peter D. Brown and Karl W. Schweizer (eds.), The Devonshire Diary. William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire. Memoranda on State Affairs. 1759–1762 (1982), p. 127, p. 130

 * Spain's conduct in putting forward her grievances under the shield of England's enemy, with whom we are at war, is the highest indignity that ever was offered to the Crown of England, and it will fix an eternal stain upon that crown if no answer is returned to Spain's avowal of her action. As to the other consideration, the safety of the public—are we not already suffering from the worst species of war, when Spain supports France with her full weight, covers her trade, lends her moneys and abets her in negotiation? You are now at war with the House of Bourbon; but, for open war with Spain, you are prepared and she is not.
 * Resignation speech to the Council (2 October 1761), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (1914), p. 112

 * Without having ever asked any one single employment in my life, I was called by my Sovereign and by the Voice of the People to assist the State when others had abdicated the service of it. That being so no one can be surprised that I will go on no longer since my advice is not taken. Being responsible I will direct, and will be responsible for nothing that I do not direct.
 * Resignation speech to the Council (2 October 1761), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (1914), pp. 112-113

 * A difference of opinion with regard to measures to be taken against Spain, of the highest importance to the honour of the crown, and to the most essential national interests, and this founded on what Spain had already done, not on what that court may further intend to do, was the cause of my resigning the seals.
 * Letter to William Beckford MP (15 October 1761), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Vol. II (1838), p. 158

 * America has been conquered in Germany, where Prince Ferdinand's victories have shattered the whole military power of that great military monarchy, France. Recall the troops from Germany, and I should be robbed of my honour, while England, by deserting her allies, would be deserted by God and man. And, honour apart, nothing but that spectre of an invasion which the Ministry of 1755 had not constancy enough to look at, frightened us out of Minorca. So would it be again, if the troops of France found themselves at liberty to quit Germany.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (13 November 1761), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (1914), p. 131

 * As Germany was formerly managed it was a millstone about our necks; as managed now, it is a millstone about the neck of France. When I came in, I found the subsidy to Prussia dictated by Hanover, not by Great Britain. I insisted that national defence and America must stand first, nor would I agree to the German war until every other service had been provided for. I acceded to the plan of a Ministry that wanted vigour and borrowed their majority to carry on their own plan. But I carried it on in my own way, and, though that may have been the wrong way, I offer myself confitentem reum, if I have not thereby annihilated French power in the East and West Indies.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (9 December 1761), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (1914), p. 132

 * While we had France for an enemy, Germany was the scene to employ and baffle her arms.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (August 1762)

 * ...the errors of Rome...[are] rank idolatry—a subversion of all civil as well as religious liberty, and the utter disgrace of reason and of human nature.
 * Letter to the Bishop of Gloucester William Warburton (October 1762), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Vol. II (1838), p. 188

 * We retain nothing, although we have conquered everything...France is chiefly, if not solely, to be dreaded by us in the light of a maritime and commercial power; and therefore by restoring to her all the valuable West India islands, and by our concessions in the Newfoundland fishery, we have given her the means of recovering her prodigious losses and of becoming once more formidable to us at sea...all the Spanish treasures and riches in America, lay at our mercy.
 * Speech against the Treaty of Paris (December 1762)

 * The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail — its roof may shake — the wind may blow through it — the storm may enter — the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter — all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
 * Speech on the Excise Bill, House of Commons (March 1763), quoted in Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen Who Flourished in the Time of George III (1855), I, p. 42.
 * repeated by Brennan, J., MILLER v. UNITED STATES, 357 U.S. 301 (1958)
 * repeated by Alfred Denning, Baron Denning, Southam v Smout [1964] 1 QB 308 at 320.

 * Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.
 * Speech, Jan. 14, 1766, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 * It is my opinion, that this kingdom has no right to lay a tax upon the colonies. At the same time I assert the authority of this kingdom over the colonies to be sovereign and supreme in every circumstance of Government and legislation whatsoever. The colonists are the subjects of this kingdom, equally entitled with yourselves to all the natural rights of mankind and the peculiar privileges of Englishmen...The Americans are the sons, not the bastards, of England. Taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power...When, therefore, in this House we give and grant, we give and grant what is our own. But in an American tax, what do we do? We, your Majesty's Commons for Great Britain, give and grant to your Majesty,—what? Our own property?—No! We give and grant to your Majesty, the property of your Majesty's Commons of America...The distinction between legislation and taxation is essentially necessary to liberty...There is an idea in some, that the colonies are virtually represented in this House...Is he represented by any knight of the shire, in any county in this kingdom?...Or will you tell him that he is represented by any representative of a borough?—a borough which perhaps its own representatives never saw.—This is what is called the rotten part of the constitution. It cannot continue a century. If it does not drop, it must be amputated...I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to let themselves be made slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest...The gentleman asks, When were the colonies emancipated? I desire to know when were they made slaves?
 * Speech in the House of Commons on the Stamp Act (14 January 1766), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), pp. 71-6.

 * There are many things a parliament cannot do. It cannot make itself executive, nor dispose of offices which belong to the crown. It cannot take any man's property, even that of the meanest cottager, as in the case of enclosures, without his being heard.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (1766), quoted in Parliamentary History of England (London, 1813), vol. 6, col. 195.

 * When the people condemn me I shall tremble but I shall set my face against the proudest connection in the country.
 * Speech in the House of Commons (10 December 1766), quoted in Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (1914), pp. 228-229

1770s

 * When then, my Lords, are all the generous efforts of our ancestors, are all those glorious contentions, by which they meant to secure themselves, and to transmit to their posterity, a known law, a certain rule of living, reduced to this conclusion, that instead of the arbitrary power of a King, we must submit to the arbitrary power of a House of Commons? If this be true, what benefit do we derive from the exchange? Tyranny, my Lords, is detestable in every shape; but in none is it so formidable as where it is assumed and exercised by a number of tyrants. But, my Lords, this is not the fact, this is not the constitution; we have a law of Parliament, we have a code in which every honest man may find it. We have Magna Charta, we have the Statute-book, and we have the Bill of Rights...It is to your ancestors, my Lords, it is to the English barons that we are indebted for the laws and constitution we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere...I think that history has not done justice to their conduct, when they obtained from their Sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta: they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people...A breach has been made in the constitution—the battlements are dismantled—the citadel is open to the first invader—the walls totter—the place is no longer tenable.—What then remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to repair it, or to perish in it?...let us consider which we ought to respect most—the representative or the collective body of the people. My Lords, five hundred gentlemen are not ten millions; and, if we must have a contention, let us take care to have the English nation on our side. If this question be given up, the freeholders of England are reduced to a condition baser than the peasantry of Poland...Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it; and this I know, my Lords, that where law ends, there tyranny begins.
 * Speech in the House of Lords on John Wilkes (9 January 1770), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), pp. 90-4

 * I have the principles of an Englishman, and I utter them without apprehension or reserve...this is not the language of faction; let it be tried by that criterion, by which alone we can distinguish what is factious, from what is not—by the principles of the English constitution. I have been bred up in these principles, and I know that when the liberty of the subject is invaded, and all redress denied him, resistance is justifiable...the constitution has its political Bible, by which if it be fairly consulted, every political question may, and ought to be determined. Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights and the Bill of Rights, form that code which I call the Bible of the English constitution. Had some of his Majesty's unhappy predecessors trusted less to the commentary of their Ministers, and been better read in the text itself, the glorious Revolution might have remained only possible in theory, and their fate would not now have stood upon record, a formidable example to all their successors.
 * Speech in the House of Lords (22 January 1770), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), p. 98

 * A long train of these practices has at length unwillingly convinced me that there is something behind the throne greater than the King himself.
 * Chatham Correspondence, Speech, March 2, 1770, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Quoted by Lord Mahon, "greater than the throne itself", in History of England, vol. v., p. 258.

 * Reparation for our rights at home, and security against the like future violations.
 * Letter to the Earl of Shelburne, Sept. 29, 1770. Compare: "Indemnity for the past and security for the future," Bertrand Russell, Memoir of Fox, vol. iii, p. 345, Letter to the Hon. T. Maitland.

 * The first great and acknowledged object of national defence in this country, is to maintain such a superior naval force at home, that even the united fleets of France and Spain may never be masters of the Channel.
 * Speech in the House of Lords (22 November 1770), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Vol. IV (1840), p. 12

 * Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or the bodies who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects...What, though you march from town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit—how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty, and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious, from the nature of things and of mankind; and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money, in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen.
 * Speech in the House of Lords (20 January 1775), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), pp. 134-6

 * You have ransacked every corner of Lower Saxony; but forty thousand German boors never can conquer ten times the number of British freemen. You may ravage—you cannot conquer; it is impossible: you cannot conquer the Americans. You talk, my Lords, of your friends among them to annihilate the Congress, and of your powerful forces to disperse their army: I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch! ...If you conquer them, what then? You cannot make them respect you; you cannot make them wear your cloth: you will plant an invincible hatred in their breasts against you. Coming from the stock they do, they can never respect you...
 * Speech in the House of Lords (30 May 1777), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), p. 144

 * I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America...As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never! ...I call upon the honour of your Lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at THE DISGRACE OF HIS COUNTRY! In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition.
 * Speech in the House of Lords (18 November, 1777), responding to a speech by Henry Howard, 12th Earl of Suffolk, who spoke in favour of the war against the American colonists. Suffolk was a descendant of Howard of Effingham, who led the English navy against the Spanish Armada. Effingham had commissioned a series of tapestries on the defeat of the Armada, and sold them to King James I. Since 1650 they were hung in the House of Lords, where they remained until destroyed by fire in 1834.
 * William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), pp. 150-6
 * My Lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me; that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy! Pressed down as I am by the hand of infirmity, I am little able to assist my country in this most perilous conjuncture; but, my Lords, while I have sense and memory, I will never consent to deprive the royal offspring of the House of Brunswick, the heirs of the Princess Sophia, of their fairest inheritance. Where is the man that will dare to advise such a measure? My Lords, his Majesty succeeded to an empire as great in extent as its reputation was unsullied. Shall we tarnish the lustre of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great kingdom, that has survived, whole and entire, the Danish depredations, the Scottish inroads, and the Norman conquest; that has stood the threatened invasion of the Spanish Armada, now fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Surely, my Lords, this nation is no longer what it was! Shall a people, that seventeen years ago was the terror of the world, now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, take all we have, only give us peace? It is impossible! ...My Lords, any state is better than despair. Let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!
 * Speech in the House of Lords (7 April 1778), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), pp. xv-xvi

 * We have a Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy.
 * Prior's Life of Burke (1790), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Quotes about William Pitt

 * Alphabetised by surname

 * He was possessed of the happy talent of transfusing his own zeal into the souls of all those who were to have a share in carrying his projects into execution; and it is a matter well known to many officers now in the House, that no man ever entered the Earl's closet who did not feel himself, if possible, braver at his return than when he went in.
 * Isaac Barré, speech in the House of Commons (13 May 1778), quoted in Lord Mahon, History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of of Aix-La-Chapelle, Vol. III (1839), pp. 22-23

 * Chatham was incomparably the greatest British statesman of the eighteenth century: none could match him in boldness of purpose or extent of achievement. Almost alone among his contemporaries he saw the vision of Britain expanded across the world, and set her feet firmly on the path of imperial greatness.
 * John Brooke, The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768 (1956), p. 385

 * The internationally acknowledged but over vast areas undeveloped monopoly of the greater part of America by Bourbon Spain appeared an unjust obstacle to the expansion of British trade. Pitt, from first to last a fiery patriot, nursed the utmost contempt for the foreigner, especially of the Catholic monarchies of Versailles and Madrid, whose subjects could not read the Bible and knew nothing of Protestant liberty. He never considered the pagan motive of greed underlying the rivalries between Britain and her Atlantic neighbours a reproach; Protestant Britain was entitled to God's blessing and the rewards of wealth and empire no detriment.
 * Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (1978), p. 398

 * Pitt had been called to power by the suffrages of the 'people', the first minister in British history chosen by acclaim. Pitt's integrity and force of character convinced men that he alone could save the country, a capacity he himself never doubted. The call for the services of Churchill in 1940, and the co-operation he too had to welcome from old enemies of bitter blood on both sides of the House, is the irresistible parallel.
 * Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (1978), p. 402

 * Chatham had been the saviour of the national pride in the face of France. In the cases of general warrants and parliamentary privilege he had served popular liberties. As upholder of the rights of the Middlesex electors he was defender of the Constitution. In the cause of America he identified political and religious freedom at home with the constitutional and natural rights of the English-speaking peoples overseas, and, the vindication too, of the national dignity against the House of Bourbon. On each count, Chatham led the way, to the example of posterity.
 * Peter Douglas Brown, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: The Great Commoner (1978), p. 412

 * [W]e may affirm with truth and impartiality, that no man was ever better fitted than Mr. Pitt, to be the minister in a great and powerful nation, or better qualified to carry that power and greatness to their utmost limits. There was in all his designs a magnitude and even a vastness, which was not easily comprehended by every mind, and which nothing but success could have made to appear reasonable... He was called to the ministry by the voice of the people; and what is more rare, he held it with that approbation... Under him Great Britain carried on the most important war in which she ever was engaged, alone and unassisted, with greater splendour, and with more success than she had ever enjoyed at the head of the most powerful alliances. Alone this island seemed to balance the rest of Europe.
 * Edmund Burke, Annual Register...For the Year 1761 (1763), p. 47

 * In the conduct of the war he never suffered the enemy to breathe, but overwhelmed them with reiterated blows, and kept up the alarm in every quarter. If one of his expeditions was not so well calculated or so successfully executed, amends was made by another, and by a third. The spirit of the nation once roused, was not suffered for a moment to subside; and the French, dazzled, as it were, by the multitude and celerity of his enterprizes, seemed to have lost all power of resistance. In short, he revived the military genius of our people; he supported our allies; he extended our trade; he raised our reputation; he augmented our dominions.
 * Edmund Burke, Annual Register...For the Year 1761 (1763), p. 47
 * Lord Chatham a great Minister & bold in his undertakings. He inspired the People of England with Martial ardour when necessary for the safety of this Kingdom. He considered Mobs in the light of a raw material which might be manufactured to a proper stuff for their own Happiness in the end.
 * Edmund Burke, quoted in "Extracts from Mr. Burke's Table-talk, at Crewe Hall. Written down by Mrs. Crewe, pp. 62.", Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society. Volume VII (1862–63), p. 13

 * This minister is, as you know, the idol of the people, who regard him as the sole author of their success, and they do not have the same confidence in the other members of the council... Pitt joins to a reputation of superior spirit and talent, that of most exact honesty...with simple manners and dignity, he seeks neither display nor ostentation... He is very eloquent, specious, wheedling, and with all the chicanery of an experienced lawyer. He is courageous to the point of rashness, he supports his ideas in an impassioned fashion and with an invincible determination, seeking to have no other ambition than to elevate Britain to the highest point of glory and to abase France to the lowest degree of humiliation.
 * François de Bussy to Étienne François, duc de Choiseul (30 August 1761), quoted in Jeremy Black, Pitt the Elder (1992), p. 215

 * [A] great man, the greatest perhaps that this age or this country has produced, to whom this country owes her present prosperity, and, I am sorry to say it, her pride, her pride of conquest, which has infatuated her, even in this impracticable war, with the ideas of victory, and certain success; that great man, from whose opinions, though some of your lordships may sometimes differ, yet there is not one of your lordships who does not pay homage to his consummate capacity, his extensive talents, his great services, and his age, when he delivers those opinions from his place.
 * Lord Camden, speech in the House of Lords (16 March 1775), quoted in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 ... Vol. XVIII. A.D. 1774—1777 (1813), column 445

 * It is a considerable fact in the history of the world, that he was for four years King of England.
 * Thomas Carlyle, in Churchill, Sir Winston. (1999) The Great Republic : A History of America. Random House. ISBN 0-375-50320-X
 * Dr. Franklin is filled with admiration of that truly great man! He has seen, in the course of life, sometimes eloquence without wisdom, and often wisdom without eloquence: in the present instance, he sees both united, as he thinks, in the highest degree possible.
 * Benjamin Franklin to Earl Stanhope (23 January 1775), quoted in W. S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle (eds.), Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, Vol. IV (1840), pp. 385-386
 * Over-bearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England,—his ambition was fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England.
 * Henry Grattan, 'Character of Mr. Pitt' (1772), quoted in Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan (1822), p. 9

 * When I saw Lord Chatham's bill, I entertained high hope that a reconciliation could have been brought about. The difference between his terms, and those offered by our Congress, might have been accommodated, if entered on, by both parties, with a disposition to accommodate. But the dignity of Parliament, it seems, can brook no opposition to its power.
 * Thomas Jefferson to William Small (7 May 1775), quoted in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (1984), p. 748

 * Both the elder and the younger Pitt delighted in a kind of ostentatious virtue which raised them, in the eyes of careless observers, to a far higher level than politicians like Burke or like Fox, who, with abilities perhaps not inferior, sacrificed incomparably more to their principles. But yet with all his faults he was a very great man—far surpassing both in mental and moral altitude the other politicians of his generation. As a war minister his greatness was beyond question, and almost beyond comparison.
 * William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II (1882), p. 485

 * The greatest War Minister of modern times.
 * David Lloyd George's remarks to George Riddell, as recorded in Riddell's diary (3 August 1918), quoted in The Riddell Diaries 1908–1923, ed. J. M. McEwen (1986), p. 232

 * The success of our arms was perhaps owing less to the skill of his dispositions than to the national resources and the national spirit. But that the national spirit rose to the emergency,—that the national resources were contributed with unexampled cheerfulness,—this was undoubtedly his work. The ardour of his spirit had set the whole kingdom on fire. It inflamed every soldier who dragged the cannon up the heights of Quebec, and every sailor who boarded the French ships amidst the rocks of Britanny.
 * Thomas Macaulay, The Edinburgh Review, Vol. 58 (1834), p. 543

 * Thus, then, after such long gestation, and so many throes and struggles, came to light the first administration of Chatham,—the greatest and most glorious, perhaps, that England had ever yet known—an administration not always, indeed, free from haste or error in its schemes, and no doubt owing their success in part to the favour of Fortune and to the genius of Generals; but still, after every allowance that can be justly required, an administration pre-eminently strong at home and victorious abroad—an administration which even now is pointed at with equal applause by contending and opposite parties, eager to claim its principles as their own.
 * Lord Mahon, History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713–1783, Vol. IV: 1748–1763 (1853), p. 108
 * With all his faults we shall want Mr Pitt, if such a complicated, such an extensive war is to be carried on. I know nobody who can plan or push the execution of any plan agreed upon in the manner Mr Pitt did.
 * Duke of Newcastle to Lord Hardwicke (15 November 1761), quoted in Philip C. Yorke, The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, Vol. III (1913), pp. 338-339

 * Pitt did not flinch from the contemplation of the violent aggression required by such an active and expanding commercial imperialism, and such an open avowal of England's aspirations bred its own elation... It was Chatham, ignorant of men, ignorant of politics, who knew with utter certainty England's destiny and showed her the way to it.
 * J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950, 1964), pp. 71-72

 * Pitt was at home with men like his grandfather, men who believed that England's greatness and prosperity depended on aggression, on seizing and holding on to the world's trade... In the late thirties and early forties Pitt had spent much time studying the statistics of French commerce and industry, which had bred the conviction that France was the greatest danger England had to face, and the only rival worth considering in the race for overseas trade... Two aims, he thought, should dominate English policy – supremacy at sea and the capture of French trading posts.
 * J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950, 1964), pp. 108-110
 * The memory of that great and glorious minister, who, to all succeeding ages, will be quoted as an illustrious example, how one great man, by his superior ability, could raise his drooping country from the abyss of despair to the highest pinnacle of glory, and render her honoured, respected, revered, and dreaded by the whole universe.
 * Admiral George Rodney (December 1779), quoted in G. B. Mundy (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Admiral Lord Rodney: Volume I (1830), pp. 204-5

 * In the last decade of the colonial period the ideal of the man of public virtue was made real in the person of William Pitt. The cult of this noblest of Whigs, "the Genius of England and the Comet of his Age" was well advanced toward idolatry at least five years before the Stamp Act. The greatest of "the great men of England", the last and noblest of the Romans, was considered the embodiment of virtue, wisdom, patriotism, liberty, and temperance... Pitt, "glorious and immortal", the "guardian of America", was the idol of the colonies. His eloquent arguments against taxation without representation were repaid in full measure by a grateful people. Ships, towns, and babies bore the proud name of Pitt; preachers, orators, and poets celebrated his Roman virtues.
 * Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (1953), pp. 145, 359–360
 * Look at the great personage who dominates English politics through the whole middle period of that century, the elder Pitt. His greatness is throughout identified with the expansion of England; he is a statesman of Greater Britain. It is in the buccaneering war with Spain that he sows his political wild oats; his glory is won in the great colonial duel with France; his old age is spent in striving to avert schism in Greater Britain.
 * John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England [1883], ed. John Gross (1971), p. 115

 * When all due allowance is made for Pitt's shortcomings, however, and credit given to others where it is due, the fact remains that he was a great war minister. His theatrical posturings and belligerent rhetoric were exactly what the country needed, a vision of itself greater than that projected by his predecessors as prime minister, the pacific Walpole, the able but self-effacing Pelham, the timid and neurotic Newcastle... In the last analysis Pitt's greatness can only be measured against the rival alternatives, and here he was a giant among pygmies.
 * W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (1977), p. 272

 * Mr. Pitt has the finest Genius, improv'd by Study, and all the ornamental Part of Classical Learning. He came early into the House of Commons, where he soon distinguish'd himself; lost a Cornecy of Horse, which was then his only subsistence; and in about twenty years, has raised himself to be first Minister, and the most powerful Subject in this Country. His Eloquence is nervous, natural, correct, and elegant. He has an astonishing Clearness, and Facility of Expression, and has an Eye as significant as his Words. He is not always a fair or conclusive Reasoner, but commands the Passions with Sovereign Authority; and to inflame or captivate a popular Assembly, is a consummate Orator. Tho his Passions are strong, and fiery, they are all obedient to his unbounded Ambition. He has courage of every sort, cool or impetuous, active or deliberate... [E]ven his Enemies must allow that he has the Firmness, and activity of a great Minister: that he has hitherto conducted the War with Spirit, Vigor, and tolerable Success: and tho some favorite Schemes have been visionary and impracticable, they have at least been more honorable, & less dangerous, than the passive, unperforming Pusillanimity, of the late Administration.
 * Lord Waldegrave, 'Memoirs of 1754–1757', The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, 1742–1763, ed. J. C. D. Clark (1988), pp. 152-153

 * Mr Pitt, on entering upon administration, had found the nation at the lowest ebb in point of power and reputation. His predecessors, now his coadjutors, wanted genius, spirit and system... France, who meant to be feared, was feared heartily... They were willing to trust that France would be so good as to ruin us by inches. Pitt had roused us from this ignoble lethargy.
 * Horace Walpole, Memoirs of King George II: Volume III (1985), p. 51

 * The admirers of Mr Pitt extol the reverberation he gave to our councils, the despondence he banished, the spirit he infused, the conquests he made, the security he affixed to our trade and plantations, the humiliation of France, the glory of Britain carried under his administration to a pitch at which it never had arrived—and all this is exactly true.
 * Horace Walpole, Memoirs of King George II: Volume III (1985), p. 53

 * When Pitt left office the Pope of Rome said that he esteemed it the highest honour to be born an Englishman. In Africa we had taken away all the French possessed; in Europe our troops had beaten the flower of their armies, while our expeditions had insulted their coasts from Dunkirk to Bordeaux and had even occupied a parcel of France; on the high seas our fleets were supreme. In America we had won a continent, in India we were masters of Bengal, and in other parts had no European rivals left—victories which ensured that in these two vast portions of the world the Protestant Anglo-Saxon—not the French Roman Catholic—civilisation should thereafter prevail. And in spite of the long war the commerce on which England's greatness then chiefly rested had never been so flourishing. To Pitt all this was due.
 * Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Volume II (1913), p. 124

 * [W]e sensibly felt the manifold good effects of your truly patriot and singularly wise and upright administration. To this we must attribute the rescuing Britain from the shameful infection of that pestilential, ministerial panic, which called foreign mercenaries to the defence of a Country, by her native force, when properly exerted, more than a match for half the powers of Europe. To your steady virtues, we stand indebted for freeing our Mother Country from the reproach of calling foreign troops to defend her from a threatened invasion, and for chastising the insolence of the vaunting invader, by inspiring the councils and arms of Britain with that ancient true National spirit, which, when duly exerted, ever has, and ever must render the British name terrible to her foes in the utmost extremities of the globe.
 * "The grateful Address of the Merchants and Traders of the City of Dublin, to the Right Hon. William Pitt, Esq; late one of his Majesty's Secretaries of State", The Gentleman's and London Magazine (November 1761), p. 544

 * That the thanks of...the City of York...be presented to the Right Honourable William Pitt, for the signal advantages this nation has derived from his upright, wise, and vigorous administration; to which, under Providence, we owe the revival of the ancient British spirit, the acquisition of the most valuable and important conquests, and the abolition of party distinctions. The loss of so able, so disinterested a Statesman, who so happily united the characters of the great Minister and the true Patriot, cannot but be deeply regretted at this critical conjuncture by every well-wisher to his King and Country.
 * "Copy of the Thanks to the Right Hon. William Pitt, from the City of York, Nov. 6, 1761", The London Chronicle, Volume 10 (1761), p. 464

 * Our toast in general is,—Magna Charta, the British Constitution,— PITT and Liberty forever!
 * "A Son of Liberty in Bristol County, Mass.", Newport Mercury (19 May 1766) on the repeal of the Stamp Act, quoted in C. Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (1953), p. 360

 * Erected by the King and Parliament As a Testimony to The Virtues and Ability of WILLIAM PITT EARL OF CHATHAM During whose Administration In the Reigns of George II and George III Divine Providence Exalted Great Britain To an Height of Prosperity and Glory Unknown to any Former Age Born November 15, 1708; Died May 11, 1778
 * Inscribed on his monument in Westminster Abbey

title: William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham


text:
Edmund White

Edmund White (born January 13, 1940) is an American novelist, memoirist, and an essayist on literary and social topics. Much of his writing is on the theme of same-sex love. Probably his best-known books are The Joy of Gay Sex (1977) (written with Charles Silverstein) and his trio of autobiographic novels, A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997).

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)

 * [Dutton, ISBN 0-525-48223-7]

 * I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having "too much" sex. At what point does a "healthy" amount become "too much"? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their cases the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such.
 * San Francisco (p. 37).

 * He's scattered, his sentences trail off, he sighs frequently, as though he's so intelligent he's always frustrated by the formulaic nature of speech (each sentence a ride you can't get off once the attendant buckles you into the car).
 * Portland and Seattle (p. 80).

 * Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.
 * Texas (p. 128).

 * In return for the costliness and inconvenience, the squalor and discomfort of our lives, we get to participate in whatever is the latest. We are never left out of anything: we know what's happening, especially since so many of us practice what Paul Valéry called the "delirious professions." As Valéry wrote, "This is the name I give to all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of oneself, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you." Although Valéry was writing eighty years ago of Paris, he anticipated the excruciating position of those gay (and straight) New York "creative people" who must be perpetually original in a "population of uniques." The cruel contradiction of such a position is that the creative "live for nothing but to have, and make durable, the illusion of being the only one — for superiority is only a solitude situated at the present limits of a species." The exigencies of the drive to originality can, as Valéry understood, promote a deep uncertainty about one's personal value. If one is a product, is it new enough? Perfect? One of a kind?
 * New York City (p. 259).

 * Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger — it might leave us stuck with last year's cause. Prized for their novelty alone, ideas, gimmicks, trends become equivalent, interchangeable.
 * New York City (p. 260).

 * Sometimes I look at the battered exteriors of apartment buildings in New York and think how these sorry shells have housed such a long procession of styles. The money! The effort! One tenant mirrors everything, the next panels the walls, the third lines them with mylar, the fourth turns to toile de Jouy, the fifth to pegboard or handblocked rice paper. The expensive if often shoddy interiors installed only to be dismantled, the exterior left untouched as it turns yet another shade sootier — this transience seems a fitting emblem for the way we stay up-to-date without ever changing.
 * New York City (p. 260).

 * Yes, sex may be at least in part inflected by politics, our fantasies may be at least in part a compendium of cultural myths, but the ways in which sex and fantasy ripen within the individual seem to me to vary so greatly that summaries become useless, even dangerous. But if I were to venture my own generalizations, I would say that with the collapse of other social values (those of religion, patriotism, the family and so on), sex has been forced to take up the slack, to become our sole mode of transcendence and our only touchstone of authenticity. The cry for scorching, multiple orgasms, the drive toward impeccable and virtuoso performance, the belief that only in complete sexual compatibility lies true intimacy, the insistence that sex is the only mode for experiencing thrills, for achieving love, for assessing and demonstrating personal worth — all these projects are absurd.
 * New York City (p. 282).

 * Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly in conversation, in the same way we may look to written language as an idealization rather than a reflection of ourselves.
 * New York City (p. 284).

A Boy's Own Story (1982)

 * [Dutton, ISBN 0-525-24128-0]

 * All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed.
 * Chapter One (p. 3).

 * Characters — conventional women with minor eccentricities — flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observed. But she'd failed to notice that the characters were all old, rich and pedigreed. Newcomers, especially those of moderate means, were expected to form an attractive but featureless chorus behind our few madcap divas.
 * Chapter One (p. 14).

 * We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named after songbirds was being dropped like a lattice of dough over a pie. Up and down Robin and Tanager and Bluebird I raced my bike; in a storm I pedaled so fast I hoped to catch up with the wind-driven rain. As I sped into the riddling wet warmth I shook my right hand according to a magical formula of my own. The universe, signaled by its master, groaned, revolved, released a flash of lightning. At last the imagination, like a mold on an orange, was covering the globe of my mind.
 * Chapter Three (p. 81).

 * In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential — we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today — well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?
 * Chapter Four (p. 92).

 * The notion that I might have been able to court friends, win attention, conjure it, would have spoiled it for me. Unbidden love was what I wanted.
 * Chapter Five (p. 110).

 * Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begins: If one man loves another he is a homosexual; I love a man...
 * Chapter Five (p. 118).

 * Tommy started to play the guitar and sing. He and I had trekked more than once downtown to the Folk Center to hear a barefoot hillbilly woman in a long, faded skirt intone Elizabethan songs and pluck at a dulcimer or to listen, frightened and transported, to a big black Lesbian with a crew cut moan her way through the blues. The People — those brawny, smiling farmers, those plump, wholesome teens bursting out of bib overalls, those toothless ex-cons, those white-eyed dust bowel victims — the People, half-glimpsed in old photos, films and WPA murals, were about to reemerge, we trusted, into history and our lives.
 * Chapter Five (p. 120).

 * The school was nothing but reminiscence — of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.
 * Chapter Six (p. 145).

 * Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms. Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex.
 * Chapter Six (p. 153).

 * Recognizing that the world is governed by a minority, the sexually active, and that they hold sway of a huge majority of the nonsexual, those people too young or too old or too poor or too homely or sick or crazy or powerless to be able to afford sexual partners (or the luxury of systematic, sustained and shared introspection, so sexual in its own way). All advertisements and films and songs are addressed to sexuals, to their rash whims and finicky tastes.
 * Chapter Six (p. 167).

 * How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a fissure in the will but as a dead fetus in the specimen jar of the unconscious. My attention was being paternally led away from the excruciating present to the happy, healthy future that would be enabled by an analysis of the sick past, as though the priest had nothing to do but study old books and make bright forecasts, the present not worthy of notice.
 * Chapter Six (p. 170).

 * I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered that he thought I, or at least some essential if somewhat abstract principle within me, was worth saving. I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happened to resemble the backstage of an opera house.
 * Chapter Six (p. 203).

Articles and Interviews

 * There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.
 * Quoted by William Goldstein, "Edmund White," Publishers Weekly, (24 September 1982)

 * For gay men this force of history has been made to come clean; it’s been stripped of its natural look. The very rapidity of change has laid bare the clanking machinery of history. To have been oppressed in the 1950s, freed in the 1960s, exalted in the 1970s and wiped out in the 1980s is a quick itinerary for a whole culture to follow. For we are witnessing not just the death of individuals but a menace to an entire culture. All the more reason to bear witness to the cultural moment.
 * Esthetics and Loss, Artforum (1987), printed in in The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Literature and Sexuality 1969-1993, (Picador, London, 1995)

 * I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out.
 * Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press (1994)

 * Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing.
 * Self-interview, Dalkey Archive Press (1994).

 * It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain. I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?" — if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point.
 * My Women.The New Yorker 6 June 2005

 * He and Marilyn were lovers, but this was never said in so many words. Explicitness about one’s romantic arrangements had apparently been deemed gauche. In my middle-class teen-age world, the whole apparatus of going steady, exchanging ID bracelets, smooching at dances, fighting, breaking up, submitting to the arbitration of friends — that was the point, the public drama.
 * My Women, The New Yorker, 6 June 2005

Quotes about Edmund White

 * I got a lot of encouragement there from John Barth...and Edmund White, whom I adored—a man of tender intelligence, and a daring writer.
 * Louise Erdrich Interview with The Paris Review (2010)

title: Edmund White


text:
Jack Osbourne

Jack Osbourne (born November 8, 1985, in London, England) is the son of Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne, and the brother of Kelly Osbourne.

Sourced

 * I'm going to get you a broken alarm clock so you'll get up in the morning.
 * The Osbournes television show.

 * I'm an ass-kicking fat kid.
 * The Osbournes television show.

 * Mom! It's the cops! I'm gonna get nicked, I'm gonna get nicked!
 * The Osbournes television show.

 * I've been up the coast of St-Barts, playing with spidermonkies, tripping on acid. Changed my whole perspective on shit.
 * The Osbournes television show

 * Kelly, there are people in Somalia who would die for a banana.
 * The Osbournes television show.

 * I'm trying to get to bed, and you guys are singing "The Whole World's in my fucking hand." I'd rather you shut the fuck up!
 * The Osbournes television show.

 * As long as I know my head's in the right place, my feet are on the ground, I think I’ll be fine.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * Back then it was a very realistic thing for me. My own thing was, you know, wake up at 5 in the afternoon, it's dark out, hang out, maybe take a shower, then start drinking, start smoking pot, go out with friends, get wasted.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * But you know, my mom having to go to the hospital seven times... like passed out because of pain... I wouldn't come home and sit with my family and be with my dad - I'd call someone up and... I'd go and get obliterated drunk and I'd go, like, on two-week benders.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * Dad was just an emotional wreck. He was drinking a lot of the time; he was smoking a lot of pot. And because he takes certain medications, the drinking were making him... you know, he wasn't even present, really.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * For a while I was suicidal and I tried to kill myself. I think I should have died about four times.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I didn't get at first put into a rehab facility; I got put in a adolescent psychiatric unit for my detox.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I don't want to come off like the jealous brother who wasn't getting the attention, but it was like no one was really into me anyway. I wasn't really a priority.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I go to a meeting every day. I surround myself with people who don't use. I recently got back from Ozzfest and I caught myself in kind of a sticky situation where I was around a lot of people using, drinking and it was kind of - I didn't have the urge to use once, but I just knew I shouldn't have been there.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I had my group of friends, you know, like my real group of friends, and then I had, like, party friends.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I had smoked pot and drank every day for two years. I was taking Vicodin by the handful. Valium, Xanax, Dilaudid, Lorcet, Lortab, Perocet, you name it. It's so easy. It's L.A., you know? You just get it from people.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I have a tendency to really stuff things. I don't really express, you know? Like, express certain feelings and stuff.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I took a bottle of pills. I'd been in Europe and I had a lot of absinthe and I was just drinking and drinking, trying to, you know, just shut my body down.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I was hanging out with no one under 21. I thought that if I really wanted to fit in I had to... show them that I was in a way just as adult as they were, 'cause I could hold my own just as well as they could, if not better.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I was interning at a record label - OK, cool. I'm gonna do what my mom did, you know, work her way up in the music industry, the business side of things. I was comfortable with that. That was what I wanted to do. And then just suddenly I am thrown from that. It was super insane.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I'd have to say that Muay Thai is something special. It's really demanding and it's becoming popular all around the world.
 * The Nation, April 28 2007

 * I'd read things, like people criticizing me. But no one likes to read stuff about that, and probably the main thing that was getting to me was me mum's illness.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I'm real clear, you know? There's no fogginess.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I'm totally grateful for the fans my family has and I have; they gave me a lot of support when I was in treatment. But it was just odd, you know? It's stressful. Just the whole fact of being someone in the public eye.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * I've been drinking and using since I was 13.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * It's been real weird. It wasn't how I expected my life to turn out. Especially, mainly pertaining to the show. It never crossed my mind that one day I'm gonna be big and famous and have my own TV show, you know?
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * My parents approached me to go to rehab... So I ran away. I just took off running. I went to a friend's house and I went pretty buck wild. I was snorting Demerol, OxyContin. I don't really remember much.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * There's a lot of things that were going on. I'd run out of OxyContin, I was doing a lot of Dilaudid. Dilaudid is like a millimeter down from OxyContin. I was doing a lot of those, and life just got super stressful for me.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * There's people outside our house; you get followed by photographers; you can't go out and have a cup of coffee with a friend without someone coming up to you
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * Well, all I can say is, it's a day-by-day program, and so I'm very worried about relapsing, but I don't know. I don't want to use. I don't want to go back to that place because nothing good came of it. It was super dark; it's not nice.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

 * Where I felt comfortable was being the one that everyone liked to party with. And it was kind of the way I could fit in.
 * MTV.com Jack Talks About His Addiction and Recovery

Attributed

 * Kelly has a rather bad habit of interrupting.

 * My mom has a tendency of flashing.

title: Jack Osbourne


text:
User talk:206.210.134.9

~ Kalki 20:29, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

title: User talk:206.210.134.9