The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

O! they’re all fled with thee,
Robin Adair.
‘Robin Adair’
11.25 Jack Kerouac 1922-69
Sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent
Existentialism...I said, ‘You know, this is really a beat generation.’
‘Playboy’ June 1959, p. 32.
11.26 Ralph Kettell 1563-1643
Here is Hey for Garsington! and Hey for Cuddesdon! and Hey Hockley! but here’s nobody
cries, Hey for God Almighty!
Sermon at Garsington Revel, in Oliver Lawson Dick (ed.) ‘Aubrey’s Brief Lives’ (1949) ‘Ralph Kettell’
11.27 Francis Scott Key 1779-1843
’Tis the star-spangled banner; O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ (1814)
11.28 Maynard Keynes (John Maynard Keynes, first Baron Keynes of Tilton) 1883-1946
I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.
Letter to Duncan Grant, 15 December 1917, in ‘British Library Add. MSS 57931’ fo. 119
He felt about France what Pericles felt of Athens—unique value in her, nothing else mattering;
but his theory of politics was Bismarck’s. He had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—
mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.
‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1919) ch. 3 (on Clemenceau)
Like Odysseus, the President looked wiser when he was seated.
‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1919) ch. 3 (on Woodrow Wilson)
Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society
than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the
side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1919) ch. 6
I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or
nothing but the past.
‘The End of Laissez-Faire’ (1926) pt. 1
Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion—how a doctrine
so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds
of men, and, through them, the events of history.
‘The End of Laissez-Faire’ (1926) pt. 3
The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already,