Going Deeper Than a Famous Quotation or Two

“By inviting further exploration of a quotation’s origin, we might re-discover great and complicated thinkers, who, it turns out, have far more to offer than a single phrase.”

They roll off the tongue, invoked from time to time, in formal speeches, articles, and in daily conversation. Favorite aphorisms range, but there are a few steady-enders that one usually does not go for too long without hearing: Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”; George Santayana’s “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”; Sen. Hiram Johnson’s “The first casualty when war comes is truth”; L.P. Hartley’s “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” to name a few.

Quotations such as these have fared well over the years, now eclipsing, in many cases, the acclaim of the authors who first uttered them. This is arguably an unfortunate development in which many deeply complex and intricate thinkers have been reduced to a single string of words: another example of an age increasingly prone to oversimplifying things. However, perhaps such a take is unnecessarily cynical, and there exists, in reality, a lurking opportunity. At least relative to other thinkers for whom we don’t even have a single quotation to remember them by, there’s the chance—when it comes to these figures—to parlay these quotations into the re-discovery of the totality of their works, as well as lessons they may have to offer for our times today.

If L.P. Hartley is remembered today, it is almost always for that famous line on the past as a foreign country. And, one would not even need to dig deeply into Hartley’s work to find the quotation; it is the first line of the prologue to his best known novel The Go-Between. Although The Go-Between (or its 1971 film adaptation) might still be of memory to some—as well as Hartley’s emphasis on personal morality—the aspect of his work most applicable today is likely his 1960 dystopian novel Facial Justice, which was once considered in the same league as the works of Orwell and Huxley. The book presents the story of a young woman living in a dystopian future where those deemed too pretty must have a procedure done to make them less attractive and, thus, look more like everyone else. Written in a post-war era already seeking to come to terms with an increasing appetite for uniformity, the book appears particularly prescient, given increasing concerns today about a culture orienting itself evermore towards aiming for the average.