Words from famous Wisconsinites in ‘The New Yale Book of Quotations’ 5. I started at the top and worked my way down.
“The New Yale Book of Quotations” (Yale University Press) herds together about 13,000 witty, outrageous, shocking and moving statements human beings have made. Editor Fred R. Shapiro has added more than 1,000 items since an earlier version of this book was published in 2006. His sources range in time from ancient Greeks and the Bhagavad Gita to Beyoncé, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Donald Trump.
A smattering of Wisconsinites are tucked among quote machines like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker. Neatly enough, they represent the variety of quotes included in this enormous book, from statements of historical significance to remarks that could cut diamonds.
Some are embedded in stories. Edna Ferber lived in Appleton as a girl and was a reporter for the Appleton PostCrescent and The Milwaukee Journal before becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. The Yale anthology reports her acid encounter with Noel Coward when both showed up at the Algonquin Round Table wearing new doublebreasted suits. “You almost look like a man,” Coward told her. She replied, “So do you.”
Here are quotes from a dozen Wisconsin folks in the new edition:
1. I have the heart of a small boy — I keep it on my desk, in a jar.
Robert Bloch, author of the novel “Psycho,” source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film, was a prolific writer of horror, fantasy and crime stories. He graduated from Milwaukee’s Lincoln High School and later worked on Carl Zeidler’s mayoral campaign. Sometimes this quip is attributed to Stephen King, which Neil Gaiman thinks happened because King liked to repeat the joke, usually attributing it to Bloch.
2. Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is!
The Yale anthology traces this exhortation from Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi to an article in the November 1962 issue of Esquire magazine. Shapiro’s book traces the overlapping “Winning … it’s the only thing” quote to UCLA football coach Red Sanders, who was first recorded uttering it in 1950.
Lombardi is not the only Packer quoted in the new collection.
3. The coach is very fair. He treats us all like dogs.
Henry Jordan was not only an All-Pro defensive tackle for the Lombardi-era Packers, he was an all-pro wit, too. After retiring from the NFL, Jordan was the first executive director of Summerfest until his death from a heart attack in 1977.
4. I hate flowers — I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.
Sun Prairie native Georgia O’Keeffe became famous for her ginormous close-up paintings of flowers, such as her Red Canna series. In a 1954 New York Herald Tribune article, she gave an unsentimental explanation for why she chose them as subjects.
Kenosha native Orson Welles was in his 20s when he made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane” (1941).
6. Houston, we’ve had a problem.
Sometimes the quote we remember is not exactly what a person said. Thanks to the movie “Apollo 13,” many people remember astronaut James
See QUOTATIONS, Page 10E
Lovell’s statement as “Houston, we
a problem.” But Lovell spoke in past tense. The movie screenwriters changed it to present tense for more suspense. Lovell graduated from Milwaukee’s Juneau High School and a downtown street is named in his honor.
7. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
The Yale collection makes room for several quotes from Aldo Leopold, the pioneering conservationist, ecologist and educator, whose classic “A Sand County Almanac” (1949) draws heavily from his observations in Sauk County.
8. Don’t be so humble — you’re not that great.
Israeli prime minister Golda Meir was fond of delivering that witty piece of advice, according to a 1969 New York Times story. Meir grew up in Milwaukee and attended the downtown school that now bears her name.
9. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Those are the final words of Madison native Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1928, spawned several movie adaptations, inspired the structure of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” and can be called the granddaddy of disaster movies. Prime Minister Tony Blair quoted Wilder’s words during a memorial service for the British victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
10. It is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.
Under the pseudonym “X,” Milwaukee-diplomat George F. Kennan published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947, articulating the American Cold War strategy and mindset that would linger for decades.
11. I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.
In 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick made that statement in response to an NFL.com reporter’s question, after Kaepernick refused to stand for the National Anthem before a preseason game against Green Bay. The quarterback, who was born in Milwaukee and spent a few childhood years in Fond du Lac, was not the first professional athlete to protest during the anthem. But his words and deeds upended and polarized the worlds of professional sports, politics and the media.
12. I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s fateful Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950 launched his reign of terror as anti-Communist crusader and witch hunter. Today, Politifact would likely give McCarthy’s statement either a False or a Pants on Fire rating. No one ever saw that purported list, though reporters kept trying, including three Milwaukee Journal staffers who grilled McCarthy during a lunch at a restaurant downtown.
Contact Jim Higgins at jim.higgins@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jhiggy.