Voltaire & Baudouin I

[Garson O'Toole]

JL wrote:
> Minutes later: Neither YBQ, Bartlett's latest, or Oxford appears to include
> either quote!  But I noted the Baudouin many years ago from a similar work.
> (An earlier Bartlett's?)

The quotation from Baudouin I, King of the Belgians does appear in
snippets from Encarta (2000) and a Military Quotation Book (2002). The
saying is probably in The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations
(1993) and The New International Dictionary of Quotations (2000), but
both these references are in "No Preview" mode so the matching words
are not visible.

Encarta book of quotations
Bill Swainson 2000
http://books.google.com/books?id=Af84fBmzmVYC&q=%22twenty+seconds%22#v=snippet&

The military quotation book: more than 1,200 of the best
James Charlton 2002
http://books.google.com/books?id=zNdFW5LIBzgC&q=%22peace+to%22#v=snippet&

The Macmillan dictionary of political quotations
Lewis D. Eigen, Jonathan Paul Siegel 1993

The new international dictionary of quotations
Margaret Miner, Hugh Rawson 2000

Political quotations: a collection of notable sayings on politics
Daniel B. Baker 1990

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Voltaire & Baudouin I
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The young King Baudouin I of Belgium (1930-1993) is often cited for having
> reminded a joint session of Congress in 1959
>  that:
>
>
> "It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty
> seconds of war to destroy him."
>
> This is a pithy reduction of a passage from Voltaire's _Philosophical
> Dictionary_ (s.v. "General Reflection on Man"):
>
> "It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in
> which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which
> is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason
> begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about
> his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It
> takes an instant to kill him."
>
> That's the Wikiquotes translation: the site offers the French text as well.
>  Others are available, though not in general dictionaries of quotations.
>
> Minutes later: Neither YBQ, Bartlett's latest, or Oxford appears to include
> either quote!  But I noted the Baudouin many years ago from a similar work.
> (An earlier Bartlett's?)
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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