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Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to say, should simply say it.

E. B. White

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E. B. White
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: July 11
Died: 1985
Died: October 1
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Mount Vernon
New York
Elwyn Brooks White
E.B. White
Individual
Lowest
Form
Manners
Anything
Number
Like
Nation
People
Numbers
Simply
Politeness
Greatest
Diplomacy
Nations
Courtesy

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Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
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English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
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America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.
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Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.
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Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
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The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything
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Even now with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
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If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
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It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
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I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
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I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
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When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.
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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
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We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
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You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
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Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.
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Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp - everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
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new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
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I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
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Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.
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