Famous Swedish Quotes

These exuberant proclamations of equalitarianism in sundown towns exemplify not only base hypocrisy but also what sociologists call "herrenvolk democracy" -- democracy for the master race. White Americans' verbal commitment to nondiscrimination forms one horn of what Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal famously called "The American Dilemma." Blatant racism forms the other horn. In elite sundown suburbs, this dilemma underlies what we shall later term the "paradox of exclusivity.

This particular bit of magic had come from Manuscript. They specialized in mirror magic, glamours, persuasion. Any object could be enchanted, the most famous being a condom that had convinced a philandering Swedish diplomat to hand over a cache of sensitive documents.

BERLIN, October 29 I’ve been looking into what Germans are reading these dark days. Among novels the three best-sellers are: (1) Gone with the Wind, translated as Vom Winde Verweht—literally “From the Wind Blown About”; (2) Cronin’s Citadel; (3) Beyond Sing the Woods, by Trygve Gulbranssen, a young Norwegian author. Note that all three novels are by foreign authors, one by an Englishman. Most sought-after non-fiction books are: (1) The Coloured Front, an anonymous study of the white-versus-Negro problem; (2) Look Up the Subject of England, a propaganda book about England; (3) Der totale Krieg, Ludendorff’s famous book about the Total War—very timely now; (4) Fifty Years of Germany, by Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and friend of Hitler; (5) So This is Poland, by von Oertzen, data on Poland, first published in 1928. Three

Green Gables has been translated into Swedish and Dutch. My copy of the Swedish edition always gives me the inestimable boon of a laugh. The cover design is a full length figure of Anne, wearing a sunbonnet, carrying the famous carpet-bag, and with hair that is literally of an intense scarlet!

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

Then one night at Buttercup’s he met this Swedish woman, Birgit, who was famous for her glass. She had dropped in to look over the brothers. She and Marcus found their affinity immediately. Both of them were serious, both were seeking, both were extraordinarily stupid. But she taught him brotherly love. She was hipped on brotherly love. Although it didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to him. She had had a number of brothers as lovers and in time she had become enthusiastic about brotherly love. But Marcus had the vision of Brotherhood.

Welcome here too, in this ordinary patch of Connecticut soil, will be the honey-green fleshed Jenny Lind, beloved musk melon of the 19th century, cast aside by commerce just because it is said that her rind wasn’t tough enough to travel… Incredible don’t you think, to have two such different women of the 19th century commemorated in one garden, the wife of Josephine’s gardener, certainly one of history’s faceless and forgotten, and then the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind, perhaps the most famous woman of her time, soprano idolized on both sides of the Atlantic, the century’s Madonna. It is said that her beauty and coloratura set millions to swooning. Come July when those melons start to swell I will be thinking of her, and of her bosom, I guess, for why else would someone name a melon after a sex-symbol?

Wallenberg Raoul Wallenberg was the second foreigner to be given honorary American citizenship. The first was Winston Churchill. The reason for this honor? Wallenberg helped to rescue many Jews from the horrors of concentration camps. The exact number of Hungarian Jews rescued directly by Wallenberg or as a result of his efforts is unknown. Low estimates are in the few thousands, but they go as high as 100,000. Either way, Wallenberg was responsible for the rescue of thousands of people when the Holocaust began in full in Hungary in 1944. Wallenberg was born into a life of privilege. His family had been at or near the center of Swedish politics and business since the mid-1800s. Today, the Wallenberg family owns significant parts of or controls many famous Swedish companies, including telecommunications