Voltaire & Baudouin I

[David A. Daniel]

Sez whom? Sez him! Write him a note and ask him what his job title is.
DAD

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Lighter


Sez whom? Belgians? They don't even believe that Walloon is French and
Flemish is Dutch. And I don't see any bold tricolor on the moon!

How about  "the king of Belgium"?

JL

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 11:06 AM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com> wrote:
ject:      Re: Voltaire & Baudouin I
>
>
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---
>
> Just FYI, there's no such thing as the King of Belgium. He is King of the
> Belgians.
> DAD
>
>
>
> 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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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org