Golden Masks and Hanging Chads
One of the continuing delights of quotations is to discover how they link
people across the years, sometimes with surprising effect. "The American people
have spoken--but it's going to take a little while to determine what they said"
commented Bill Clinton in autumn 2000, as the saga of hanging chads in Florida
unfolded in the Bush-Gore presidential contest. "One of the nuisances of the
ballot is that when the oracle has spoken you never know what it means" was the
view, in 1877, of the British Conservative statesman Lord Salisbury.
Some of our most memorable quotations are also the simplest: the summing-up
of a breathtaking moment, such as Buzz Aldrin's "Beautiful! Beautiful!
Magnificent desolation" (on the first moon walk, 1969) or Francis Crick's "We
have discovered the secret of life!" (on the discovery of the structure of DNA,
1953). A similar simplicity marks the telegram sent in 1876 by Heinrich
Schliemann on his unearthing of a gold mask at Mycenae: "I have gazed upon the
face of Agamemnon."
Other links, of course, may be consciously made. When the death of the great
photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was announced in August 2004, there were
numerous references to his slogan "the decisive moment", which he had famously
taken as the title of his 1950s collection of photographs. Many accounts assumed
that Cartier-Bresson had coined the phrase, but in fact he had drawn it from a
much older source: the 17th century Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz. The
Cardinal, a Machiavellian figure at the Court of the young Louis XIV, had
written, "There is nothing in the world which does not have its decisive moment,
and the masterpiece of good management is to recognize and grasp this moment."
For chapter and verse on these and over 20,000 other quotations, turn to the
6th edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, publishing November 2004.
Elizabeth Knowles
01/09/2004
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