“Paris is worth a mass.” (“Paris vaut une messe.”)

From 1562 to 1598, a series of bloody wars was waged in France between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots, collectively called “The French Wars of Religion.”

This particular series of European religious conflicts ended with the Edict of Nantes, which was essentially a truce providing some basic religious freedoms to both Catholics and Protestants.

The Edict of Nantes was issued in 1598 by King Henry IV and it’s one of the reasons why he became popularly known as “le bon roi Henri” — “the good king Henry.”

Nine years earlier, Henry had became the legal heir to the throne, after King Henry III was assassinated by a fanatical Catholic monk.

Henry IV was a Huguenot, like his predecessor, when he inherited the crown.

And, although most of the country accepted him as King, many Catholics refused to recognize his authority — especially in the vitally important, Catholic-controlled city of Paris.

Henry decided to try to break the political and religious logjam and reunite the country by converting to Catholicism.

He did so in a very public ceremony at the basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris on Sunday morning, July 25, 1593.

That day, according to legend, he told a friend “Paris vaut une messe.” (“Paris is worth a mass.”)

This famous quote (sometimes given as “Paris veult une messe”) was not actually recorded at the time. It was attributed to Henry IV years later and is probably apocryphal.

However, Henry clearly did embrace the basic idea. He felt it was worth converting if it meant he could gain control of Paris and unite the country under his rule.

Henry’s conversion and his Edict of Nantes did unite the country and bring an end to the French Wars of Religion — but not to religious fanaticism.

In 1610, good King Henry IV was assassinated in Paris by the Catholic zealot François Ravaillac.

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“I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was…”

Two famous quotes by President Harry S. Truman are linked to the date April 11.

The first is something Truman said about a historic announcement he made on April 11, 1951.

On that date, Truman announced his decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur, the “Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers” in Korea, for disagreeing with his policy of limiting the expansion of the Korean War.

It was the culmination of a dispute that started the previous year.

In November and December of 1950, Mao Tse-tung (a.k.a. Mao Zedong), the new leader of the Communist People’s Republic of China, sent hundreds of thousands of Red Chinese troops to fight alongside North Koreans against American and South Korean forces.

MacArthur wanted to respond by attacking China, possibly with nuclear weapons.

Truman firmly squelched that idea.

But MacArthur, who’d enjoyed great popularity with the public since World War II and had a huge ego, decided to try to play a game of political chicken with Truman.

In late March, he wrote a letter to Republican Congressman Joseph W. Martin in which he clearly criticized the President’s policy and slyly played the Red scare card.

His letter suggested that China’s intervention in Korea should be met with “maximum counterforce” and said, in an obvious reference to Truman: “It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest.”

As MacArthur expected, Martin made the letter public.

Truman was furious. And, after a series of discussions with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he decided to relieve MacArthur of his command.

On the night of April 11, 1951, Truman officially announced his firing of MacArthur in a special broadcast to the American people.

Truman’s famous quote about that decision came to light years later, in 1974, with the publication of the best-selling book Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman.

The book, by Merle Miller, was based on taped-recorded interviews made with Truman in the 1960s.

In one chapter, Miller provided Truman’s response when asked why he decided to fire General MacArthur.

Truman’s salty answer soon became a famous quote. 

“I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President…I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the laws for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

Of course, there’s another, even better-known quote that’s associated with Truman’s firing of MacArthur.

On April 19, 1951, eight days after he was relieved of duty, MacArthur made a high-profile “farewell address” to a joint meeting of Congress. That speech included the familiar line: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

There’s also a second Truman quotation that’s linked to the date April 11th, but it’s not about MacArthur. It’s Truman’s humorous, oft-cited explanation of the difference between a politician and a statesman.

On April 11, 1958, speaking to the Reciprocity Club in Washington, D.C., the retired president said:

“A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”

To read the background on that famous quotation, see this previous post on This Day in Quotes.

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Further reading about President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur…

“Each man kills the thing he loves.” (Sometimes with a straight razor.)

On February 13, 1898, the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s now famous poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published in London by publisher Leonard Smithers.

Those initial copies of the slim volume of poesy did not mention Wilde’s name. The author was given as “C.3.3.,” a reference to Wilde’s cell number while he was in the Reading prison from 1895 to 1897, serving a two year sentence for being a homosexual.

C.3.3. was prison shorthand for Block C, third floor, third cell.

Because of his highly-publicized conviction for “sodomy,” Smithers and Wilde decided to omit the poet’s real name on the first edition of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” fearing it might hurt sales.

After the first small run sold out and several subsequent editions also sold well, Wilde’s name finally appeared on the seventh edition.

The most famous and quoted line from the poem is “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”

But “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is not some sappy love ode. It is a dark rumination on murder, the harshness of prison life and the execution of a fellow prisoner of Wilde’s, referred to as “C.T.W.” in the poem.

C.T.W. was Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a former trooper in Her Majesty's Royal Horse Guards in London.

Wooldridge and his young wife Nellie, whose full maiden name was Laura Ellen Glendell, had a short, unhappy marriage. He suspected her of infidelity and abused her. She decided to live apart from him in Windsor.

In March of 1896, trooper Wooldridge begged Nellie to meet him at his barracks in London to discuss reconciliation.

She supposedly agreed, but didn’t show up. So he took a train to Windsor.

On on March 29, 1896, Charlie went to Nellie’s home and cut her throat with the straight razor he’d brought along.

He was quickly arrested, convicted of murder, then sent to the Reading Gaol, which is where Wilde met him.

Wilde apparently liked Charlie and viewed him as a tragic figure deserving of sympathy. But it was a short relationship. On July 7, 1896 Wooldridge was executed by hanging at age 30.

After Wilde was released from prison, he wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

It starts with a dedication that says: “In Memoriam, C. T. W. Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards.”

Here, is a key part of the poem that reflects Wilde’s sympathetic view of Wooldridge:

“He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty space.”

The poem goes on in that way for quite a while. In fact, it’s much longer. But the excerpt above is enough to understand the main point Wilde was trying to make.

I get it. And I recognize the brutal nature of what was considered to be “justice” in the Victorian era. I especially sympathize with Wilde over the absurdly harsh treatment he received simply for being gay.

But I find it hard to feel sorry for Charles Wooldridge.

And, I am hereby dedicating this post on This Day in Quotes to poor Nellie.

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Looking back at some famous quotes generated by the “Lewinsky Scandal”

In addition to generating a lot of political fireworks, the “Lewinsky Scandal” involving President Bill Clinton and 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky generated several famous quotations.

On January 26, 1998, President Bill Clinton held a press conference in which he famously and vehemently denied having an affair with Lewinsky, saying:

       “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!”

Of course, months later, after a grand jury investigation, he admitted that he did.

But on January 27, 1998, the day after Bill’s initial high profile denial, First Lady Hillary Clinton defended her husband and uttered another now-famous quote.

She said it in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show.

Lauer politely but persistently asked tough questions about Bill’s “alleged” affair with Monica and about the so-called “Whitewater” investigation into the Clintons’ past financial affairs, which was being conducted by independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

Hillary gamely stood by her husband, just as she did six years earlier, during the Clintons’ game-changing January 26, 1992 interview on 60 Minutes, when she huffed: “I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette.”

In the Today Show interview, when Lauer asked her about Lewinsky, Clinton said (apparently unaware of the multiple ironies): “I think the important thing now is to stand as firmly as I can and say that, you know, the president has denied these allegations on all counts, unequivocally.”

She went on to say she was “very concerned about the tactics being used and the kind of intense political agenda” of people who were criticizing and investigating the Clintons.

She told Matt:

“The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Hillary’s use that day made the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” a widely-known political phrase. But she didn’t coin it.

It had been used years before in news stories unrelated to the Clintons.

In 1991, a story about British movies in the Detroit News said: “Thatcher-era Britain produced its own crop of paranoid left-liberal films... All posited a vast right-wing conspiracy propping up a reactionary government ruthlessly crushing all efforts at opposition under the guise of parliamentary democracy.”

An Associated Press story in 1995 used the phrase in a story about the Oklahoma City bombing, saying it was the work of a few malcontents rather than “some kind of vast right-wing conspiracy.”

In the fall of 1998, the Lewinsky Scandal went on to generate yet another famous quote.

On August 17, 1998, President Clinton gave videotaped testimony to the grand jury. The video was released publicly by the House Judiciary Committee of Congress on September 21, 1998.

When it was, the world heard Bill’s legendary response when asked if he and Monika had previously lied when they said there is no sexual relation between them. He said, straight-faced:

“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If ‘is’ means is and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.”

I am not now and never have been part of any right-wing (or left-wing) conspiracy. But I have to say, I think that “meaning of the word ‘is’” quote, in particular, is an example of why Bill got the nickname “Slick Willie.”

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What were the “top quotes” of 2013?

I recently looked through a couple dozen lists of “top” and “best” quotes of 2013 and came to a disappointing conclusion.

In terms of truly memorable quotations that generated new idiomatic expressions and catchphrases or that will show up in future books of quotations, the year 2013 was pretty much a bust.

Browse through some of the lists of the supposed top or best quotes of 2013 at this link yourself and you’ll understand why I say that.

For example, as far as I can tell from the lists of the “top” or “best” political quotes of the year, no politician said anything in 2013 that will be cited by large numbers of history or quotation books years from now.

And, what line from a movie released in 2013 do you remember and hear people using regularly, the way people remember and make quips with lines like “May the Force be with you” or “I’ll be back” or “You can’t handle the truth”? If there were any, they’re not in the lists of the top or best movie lines of 2013 that I’ve seen.

Similarly, can you think of a catchphrase from a TV show that debuted in 2013 that has embedded itself in our language? Anything that will become as familiar as lines like “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” or “To boldly go where no man has gone before” or “Well isn’t that special?” I’m guessing not.

So, what are the top quotes of 2013?

The most widely-published annual list of “top quotes” is the one released by Yale University librarian Fred Shapiro, editor of the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations. It gets reprinted by thousands of newspapers and websites.

Shapiro has been issuing his list of the top quotes of the year since 2007. As he explained in a video on the Yale News website, his choices aren’t simply based on whether a quote has become “famous.” He says he also picks quotes that he views as historically important or revealing of the spirit of the times.

Even given those broader parameters, I think he had a lot better options to pick from in previous years.

You can read Shapiro’s complete 2013 list

at this link.

His number one quote of the year is a comment President Barack Obama made about the Affordable Health Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”) at a news conference on November 14, 2013:

“With respect to the pledge I made that if you like your plan you can keep it: the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate.”

With respect to Fred, that may be a historic admission but it’s not a very memorable quotation.

It’s a comment on a famous promise Obama repeated in various ways in 2009 and 2010, usually summarized as “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

The most cited version is probably the one in his speech to the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, in which he used the word period at the end for emphasis:

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”

That statement wasn’t given much notice in 2009 but, ironically, it did become a famous quote in 2013.

When Obamacare began to be implemented this past year, opponents of the plan discovered that some Americans would not actually be able to keep their existing health care plans if those plans didn’t meet certain minimum quality criteria in the law’s fine print.

So, during 2013, Republican politicians and pundits gleefully (and endlessly) reminded everyone that Obama had previously said if you like your health care plan, you could keep it. Politico.com actually dubbed it “The Lie of the Year” for 2013 — even though Obama didn’t say it in 2013.

Indeed, there is only one quotation on Fred Shapiro’s list of the top quotes of 2013 that I think will likely be considered a “famous quote” in the future. It’s actually famous already, in the sense of being familiar to most reasonably aware people and frequently cited, mocked and satirized.

But it was also uttered prior to 2013.

It’s the oft-parodied remark made by Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, at a press conference on December 21, 2012:

     “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Shapiro included it on this year’s list because it was uttered after he issued his 2012 list in mid-December of last year.

So, I’m guessing that in his list of the top quotes of 2014, Fred may include a few that were uttered shortly after he issued his 2013 list.

One is now paraphrased as “Santa is white.”

That’s the shortened version of some immediately controversial and widely-covered remarks made by Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly on December 11, 2013.

Responding to an article she’d read which said the constant depiction of Santa Claus as a white man makes some black children feel uncomfortable and excluded, Kelly opined:

     “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white. But this person is maybe just arguing that we should also have a black Santa. But, you know, Santa is what he is...Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure; that’s a verifiable fact – as is Santa, I want you kids watching to know that.”

Kelly later said her remarks were intended to be humorous, but nobody really believed it. And, mentions of “Santa is white” quickly became — and will likely remain — a popular target of scorn and satire by Liberals and comedians in the future.

There were some other politically-incorrect statements by another TV celebrity that came to light after Shapiro’s issued his list of top quotes for this year.

Yep, I’m referring to the remarks that Phil Robertson, star of the Duck Dynasty reality TV show, made about homosexuals and African Americans in an interview in the January 2014 issue of GQ magazine, which actually hit newsstands and made news in December of 2013.

As you’ve probably heard (unless you’ve been living off the grid somewhere), Robertson compared homosexuality to bestiality. He also suggested that homosexuals won’t get into heaven.

Specifically, when asked what he thought was sinful, Robertson is quoted as responding:

     “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Robertson also managed to offend African Americans in his GQ interview, saying:

     “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

The Duck Dynasty patriarch’s comments generated a ton of press and controversy.

I don’t know if they’ll show up in future editions of Bartlett’s or the Yale Book of Quotations. But given the attention they generated, I will be surprised if Fred Shapiro doesn’t mention them in his next annual list of top quotes.

Happy New Year from This Day in Quotes!

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