Confederacy Of Dunces Quotes

Jail was preferable. There they only limited you physically. In a mental ward they tampered with your soul and worldview and mind. ~ John Kennedy Toole

Paugh!" the troll scoffed. "Romance. Kissing and folly. Where's the story, where's the philosophy? I'm a troll, and even I can't rip a bodice. You should read real literature. The classics." He held up a book called Ye Olde Clubbe of Fisticuffs. "This is one of my favorites. It's all about, like, rejecting capitalism." He held up another, the spine as yet uncracked, called Alliance of Nincompoops. "Or this one, about a misunderstood genius. You should read it. I'd love to chat about what the true meaning of success is when we're living in a world that values looks instead of substance. ~ Delilah S. Dawson

The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result. ~ Donald Harington

I like characters like Ignatius Reilly in 'A Confederacy of Dunces' and Ricky Gervais's character in 'The Office.' They think one thing about themselves, but the truth is as far from that as it can be. So I began to think about how to put that kind of character in a book for kids. ~ Stephan Pastis

Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces. ~ Jill Ciment

The constitution of human nature" teaches us not to expect "that the persons, entrusted with the administration of the affairs of the particular members of a confederacy, will at all times be ready, with perfect good humor, and an unbiased regard to the public weal, to execute the resolutions of decrees of the general authority." "This tendency is not difficult to be accounted for," Publius argues, "It has its origin in the love of power. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Instead of revering a four-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years. ~ Mitch Landrieu

An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Rose insisted on being taken to shore to fulfill her duty to her cause, but the lifeboat carrying her capsized in rough surf. She might have survived had she not been carrying $2,000 in gold for the Confederacy strapped beneath her clothing. The weight of the gold pulled her under and she drowned on October 1, 1864 ~ Jack Steinberg

The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life. ~ John Kennedy Toole

Drug addicts, especially young ones, are conformists flocking together in sticky groups, and I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce); as I have said often enough, I write for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts. Young dunces who turn to drugs cannot read "Lolita," or any of my books, some in fact cannot read at all. Let me also observe that the term "square" already dates as a slang word, for nothing dates quicker than conservative youth, nor is there anything more philistine, more bourgeois, more ovine than this business of drug duncery. Half a century ago, a similar fashion among the smart set of St. Petersburg was cocaine sniffing combined with phony orientalities. The better and brighter minds of my young American readers are far removed from those juvenile fads and faddists. I also used to know in the past a Communist agent who got so involved in trying to wreck anti-Bolshevist groups by distributing drugs among them that he became an addict himself and lapsed into a dreamy state of commendable metempsychic sloth. He must be grazing today on some grassy slope in Tibet if he has not yet lined the coat of his fortunate shepherd. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders' ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states' rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions. ~ Nancy Isenberg

There are among us those that would criticize our Confederate ancestors. Would you allow a stranger to come into your house and criticize your little ones? I say it's not whether we should be ashamed of our fathers and mothers of the Old Confederacy. I say it's a question of whether they should be ashamed of us. ~ Calvin Johnson

For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself ~ Thomas Hobbes

The dangers of a concentration of all power in the general government of a confederacy so vast as ours are too obvious to be disregarded. ~ Franklin Pierce

Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support. ~ Andrew Jackson

Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain. ~ Steve Erickson

An elite confederacy of nerds. My peeps ~ Kathy Reichs

I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. ~ Corey Reynolds

The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire. ~ Michael Hastings

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. ~ Mitch Landrieu

The defect of power in the existing confederacy, to regulate the commerce between its several members is in the number of those which have been clearly pointed out by experience ... A very material object of this power was the relief of the States which import and export through other States from the improper contributions levied on them by the latter. ~ James Madison

All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery - Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy - were Democrats. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

You can do but one of these things; it is folly to attempt anything else, for there cannot exist a slave confederacy and a free confederacy side by side upon this continent. ~ John Brough

Neither these statesmen nor their constituents sought in any way to use the Government for the interest of themselves or their section, or for the injury of a single member of the Confederacy. ~ Robert Toombs

I have known several persons of great fame for wisdom in public affairs and councils governed by foolish servants. I have known great ministers, distinguished for wit and learning, who preferred none but dunces. I have known men of valor cowards to their wives. I have known men of cunning perpetually cheated. I knew three ministers who would exactly compute and settle the accounts of a kingdom, wholly ignorant of their own economy. ~ Horace Walpole

A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss. ~ John Kennedy Toole

What am I then ... ? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity and old age all have brought me their thoughts ... their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name Goethe. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The United States form a young republic, a confederacy which ought ever to be cemented by a union of interests and affection, under the influence of those principles which obtained their independence. ~ Mercy Otis Warren

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic. ~ C.S. Lewis

Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population. ~ Allen C. Guelzo

For almost one hundred years, leaders of the white South managed to freeze race relations and racial ideology in something close to the Confederate pattern, thus demonstrating that the passage of time by itself does not erase a conflicted past. Elite southern men and women created an ideology of the Lost Cause that wrapped antebellum society, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and postwar racism in the mantle of a protective, laudatory myth. The Lost Cause portrayed the white South as cultured, chivalrous, and superior while making the North into the aggressor - crude, unprincipled, and vindictive.

[...] Even after 1900 the Lost Cause ideology continued to gain strength under the leadership of a new generation, until most southern whites came to believe that their history and the myth were identical [75 - 76]. ~ Paul D. Escott

The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these Germans; the enjoyment of it, their best treasure; the word that expressed that enjoyment the most pleasing to their ear. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained the honourable epithet of Franks or Freemen; which concealed, though it did not extinguish, the peculiar names of the several states of the confederacy. ~ Edward Gibbon

The triumph of the Confederacy ... would be a victory for the powers of evil which would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the sprits of its friends all over the civilized world ... [The American Civil War] is destined to be a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs. ~ John Stuart Mill

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers
or should I say, nurses?
will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us. ~ C.S. Lewis

Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn't know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

ETHNOLOGY, n. The science that treats of the various tribes of Man, as robbers, thieves, swindlers, dunces, lunatics, idiots and ethnologists. ~ Ambrose Bierce

In 1988, the Senate passed a Resolution "To acknowledge the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States Constitution," which included affirmations that "the original framers of the Constitution, including, most notably, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are known to have greatly admired the concepts of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy" and "the confederation of the original Thirteen Colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself. ~ Peter Manseau

It is unclear if corporate governments are truly the dunces of human health or if they are just faking it in order to propagate a biologically toxic agenda on an unsuspecting global population. ~ Steven Magee

It was a running joke among the shipping industry - if the people of the nation had to choose between weapons or coffee, the Confederacy would end at the Canadian border. ~ Robert Edward