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date: 05 February 2023

Elbert Hubbard 1859–1915
American writer 

  1. Never explain—your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
    The Motto Book (1907); see Disraeli, Wodehouse
  2. Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
    The Roycroft Dictionary (1914)
  3. Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.
    Thousand and One Epigrams (1911)
  4. One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
    Thousand and One Epigrams (1911)
  5. If I had but two loaves of bread I would sell one of them, and buy White Hyacinths to feed my soul.
    White Hyacinths (1907); a Middle Eastern proverb says ‘If you have two coins, use one to buy bread, the other to buy hyacinths’
  6. Life is just one damned thing after another.
    in Philistine December 1909; often attributed to Frank Ward O'Malley; see Millay