| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
| |
| |
| NUMBER: | 41177 |
| QUOTATION: | It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio’s clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u’s, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. The Eye, sect. 2 (1965). |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Columbia Encyclopedia. |
| |
| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
|
|
