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  • From Stettin in the Baltic toTrieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Speech at Fulton, Missouri, 5 Mar. He had used the phrase in a telegraph to President Truman,12 May1945, when he said of the Russian-held territories that 'An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front'.

  • As to a Southern Continent, I do not believe any such thing exists, unless in a high altitude.

    - CaptainJames Cook
    ^71 Captain Cook's Journal during his First Voyage Round the World made in H. M. Bark'Endeavour'.

  • The Continent will not suffer England to be the workshop of the world.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
      House of Commons,15 Mar.

  • No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

    -John Donne
      Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation no.17.

  •    U.S.A. is the slice of a continent.U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in bya Western Union boy on a black-board, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled in the margins in pencil.U.S.A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills.U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts.U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery.U.S.A. is the letters at theend of anaddresswhenyouareaway from home.But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people

    -John Roderigo Dos Passos
      U.S. A.,'U.S. A.' (new prologue to collected trilogy).

  • Noble men in the quiet of morning hear Indians singing the continent's violent requiem.

    -William Dunbar
      The Opening of the Field,'A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar'.

  • Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

    - H(erbert) A(lbert) L(aurens) Fisher
      History of Europe, ch.1.

  •    And as the moon rose higher the unessential houses begantomelt awayuntilgradually Ibecameaware ofthe old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyesa fresh, green breast of the new world† For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

    - F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald
      The Great Gatsby, ch.9.

  • I felt quite funny when Freud died. It was like having a continent disappear.

    - Randall Jarrell
      Letter to  Allen Tate, Sep.

  • Presently I shall be introduced as 'this venerable old gentleman'and the axe will fall when they raise meto the degreeof 'grandoldman'.Thatmeansonourcontinentany onewithsnow-whitehair whohaskeptoutof jailtill eighty.

    - Stephen Butler Leacock
      My Remarkable Uncle,'Three Score and Ten'.

  • Four score and sevenyears ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal†we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 510

    - Abraham Lincoln
      Dedication address, Gettysburg NationalCemetery,19 Nov.

  • The most striking of all the impressions that I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of African national consciousness. In different places it may take different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent.Whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

    -Stockton
      Speech to the South  African Parliament, 3 Feb.

  • If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian† I shall always come back to rest in the shadow of the blue mountains, in the heart of this vast, deserted continent which gave me birth.

    - Dame Nellie real name Helen Mitchell Melba
      Melodies and Memories, ch.1.

  • On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.

    - George Mikes
      How to Be an  Alien.

  •    I am convinced that the history of so-called scientific work in our famous centers of European civilization will, in a couple of hundred years, represent an inexhaustible source of laughter and sorrow for future generations. The learned men of the small western part of our European continent lived for several centuries under the illusionthatthe eternal blessed life wastheWest'sfuture. They were interested in the problem of when and where this blessed life would come.But they never thought of how they were going to make their life better.

    - Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
      What is Art? (translated byV Tchertkoff).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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