1925 Quotes

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body: The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient. ~ Robert Wachter

I can look back ... at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place. ~ Ben Katchor

These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact. Mathematics is abstract and it is hard, and any assertion that it is simple is true only in a severely technical sense - that of the modern postulational method which, as a matter of fact, was exploited by Euclid. The assumptions from which mathematics starts are simple; the rest is not. ~ Eric Temple Bell

[About Ernest Hemingway] He's a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1925, when Britain went back to the gold standard, that was supported by the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Bank of England, the civil service, the CBI, the TUC, the Times, the Economist; that consensus was very strong. ~ Ed Balls

Campaign Against Akhmatova Begins (1922)

She ran from lamppost to lamppost, the wind slammed.
Trotsky reviewed her in Pravda: One reads with dismay...
and an unofficial Communist Party resolution banned her poetry (1925).
She didn't notice, didn't know what a Communist Party was in those days.
Fog choked the city.
Russia's great poets were all about 35 years ol
Scraggly trees wandered by the canal in dim sun. ~ Anne Carson

I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream."
"I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge. ~ Sebastian Faulks

Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles - or major deflations - on any national scale," he'd said. "This is ridiculous, of course ... . In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. ~ Michael Lewis

In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman's marriage, coincided with Woolf 's most productive years as a writer. ~ Jane Goldman

Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's memoir of 1925. ~ Bill Bryson

Erik Satie died on July 1, 1925; his last words were 'Ah, the cows ... ~ John Richardson

The reader can test his own psychology by asking himself whether he would consider, in retrospect, the selling at 156 in 1925 and buying back at 109 in 1931 was a satisfactory operation. Some may think that an intelligent investor should have been able to sell out much closer to the high of 381 and to buy back nearer the low of 41. If that is your own view you are probably a speculator at heart and will have trouble keeping to true investment precepts while the market rushes up and down. ~ Benjamin Graham

Ladies and Gentlemen! Silence please!" Every one was startled. They looked round-at each other, at the walls. Who was speaking? The Voice went on- a high clear voice.
You are charged with the following indictments:
Edward George Armstrong, that you did upon the 14th day of March, 1925, cause the death of Louisa Mary Clees.
Emily Caroline Brent, that upon the 5th November, 1931, you were responsible for the death of Beatrice Taylor.
William Henry Blore, that you brought about the death of James Stephen Landor on October 10th, 1928.
Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, that on the 11th day of August, 1935, you killed Cyril Ogilvie Hamilton.
Philip Lombard, that upon a date in February, 1932, you were guilty of the death of twenty-one men, members of an East African tribe.
John Gordon Macarthur, that on the 4th of January, 1917, you deliberately sent your wife's lover, Arthur Richmond, to his death.
Anthony James Marston, that upon the 14th day of November last, you were guilty of murder of John and Lucy Combes.
Thomas Rogers and Ethel Rogers, that on the 6th of May, 1929, you brought about the death of Jennifer Brady.
Lawrence John Wargrave, that upon the 10th day of June, 1930, you were guilty of the murder of Edward Seton.
Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defense? ~ Agatha Christie

Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic. ~ Molly Guptill Manning

Analysis should release an experience that grips us or falls upon us as from above, an experience that has substance and body such as those things which occurred to the ancients. If I were going to symbolize it I would choose the Annunciation. - Seminar 1925 ~ C. G. Jung

There's a different kind of comfort that comes from knowing that you are putting your best foot forward. It's called psychological comfort. Look at a picture of the Coney Island boardwalk in 1925. Men were in full-on three-piece suits, hats. They may have only had one suit. But they pressed it. They made it look as good as possible. ~ Tom Ford

One of the less apparent but most profound consequences of domestic electric lighting was the encouragement of reading at home. Increased reading broadened knowledge, stirred new interests, and created a more sophisticated society, especially away from centers of culture, which in turn increased demand for electricity. Persons who had trouble reading by dim fire- or candlelight, and especially young children who could not be left alone to regulate gaslights, could easily and safely read by electric light. Partly for this reason, the Muncie, Indiana, public library loaned out eight times as many books per inhabitant in 1925 as it had in 1890. The cartoon symbol of a light bulb being switched on over someone's head as they achieved new insight was firmly grounded in reality. ~ David E. Kyvig

But this I can never explain to a painter, I suppose; how words live in companies, never used, exept when one writes. (5/2/1925 - From a letter to Jacques Raverat) ~ Virginia Woolf

Martin, Willie Wash (? - 1926) YEARS ACTIVE: 1920-1925 VICTIMS: 7 RACE OF VICTIMS: White AREA: Arkansas KILL METHODS: Bludgeoning RAPE: Yes NOTES: His victims were all attractive women who walked past a swamp where he spent a good deal of time. After dragging them into the swamp, he raped them and then beat them to death with rocks, tree branches, or pipes. He was later executed by electrocution. ~ Justin Cottrell

My father is a silent cinema freak, so he took me to 1925 silent films that took forever, like 5-hour movies, but I've seen a lot of that stuff since I was young. And then I saw the film 'Annie,' and I just wanted to be Annie; I just wanted to be that orphan kid and wanted to sing and dance. ~ Carice Van Houten

Absolutely delightful, at first for its unspoiled picture of late-nineteenth-century Japan as seen through the eyes of three remarkable but very different Americans, [the missionary William Elliot Griffis [1843-1928], the scientist Edward Sylvester Morse [1838-1925], and the writer Lafcadio Hearn], and then for the marvelous reconstruction of how Japan worked on their minds, radically changing their perceptions of the country and the whole relationship between East and West
between the barbarian and the civilized. The book is a tour de force. ~ Edwin O. Reischauer

I read somewhere that the sun's getting hotter every year," said Tom genially. "It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun
or wait a minute
it's just the opposite
the sun's getting colder every year." 1925 ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

[Your letter] is a morass of confusion, wordiness, overloaded sentences and strained metaphors… [The greater part of it is incomprehensible], or else it is that I have neither the time nor the patience to dig the principle sentence out of the surrounding forests of subordinate clauses." – Vera Brittain to her husband George Catlin, 1925. ~ Vera Brittain

For more details about the Curies especially, see Sheilla Jones's wonderful book The Quantum Ten, an account of the surprisingly contentious and fractious early days of quantum mechanics, circa 1925. ~ Sam Kean

On July 13, 1925, Walt and Lillian were married. They spent their honeymoon at Mount Rainier. On their wedding night, Walt had such a bad toothache that he couldn't sleep. To take his mind off the pain, he left their room and helped a porter shine shoes all night. The next morning he went to a dentist and had his tooth pulled. It certainly wasn't the most fun way to start off a marriage. But Walt had a good story to tell. ~ Whitney Stewart

The funny thing is that the studio that we recorded in was the same studio that Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole used to warm up their voices in before they went across the street to CBS Radio. The owner has preserved it exactly the way it was in 1925. It was such a perfect coincidence that we were doing music inspired by that stuff in that room. It was incredible. ~ Hamilton Leithauser

The Seven Social Sins are:

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.


From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925. ~ Frederick Lewis Donaldson