Every so often, a quotation sweeps through the world like an epidemic. Hemingway must have cursed the day when he unearthed “for whom the bell tolls,” which began as a reflection on mortality and ended as a facetious crack about the telephone. A caution to all leader-writers and speechmakers: there is nothing so powerless as a quotation whose time has come and gone. ~From The Listener (London), quoted in Encounter, 1982TPVgb
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