About Last Night

“One of the difficulties with all our institutions is the fact that we’ve emphasized the reward instead of the service.”

Harry S. Truman, letter to Harold E. Moore (September 27, 1949)

“There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.”

Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Vladimir Horowitz plays Schubert’s Impromptu, Op. 90, No. 2, at a recital in Vienna in 1987:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“It is drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.”

Jacques Barzun, Critical Questions

From 2005:

I went to my framer yesterday afternoon and picked up the presidential commission for my appointment to the National Council on the Arts. It’s a splendidly old-fashioned document, about twice the size of a college diploma, printed in copperplate script on thick cream paper by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It is, of course, a fill-in-the-blank form, starting with a space on top for the current president’s name, with the blanks filled in by a calligrapher….

Read the whole thing here.

“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.”

Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day

In an undated TV interview, Gore Vidal talks about Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1964 screen version of The Best Man, his 1960 play, and the ideas about politics on which it was based:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“To want power is corruption already.”

Gore Vidal, The Best Man