"We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when, beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashings of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a damned fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with that same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke the thought aloud, 'Why don't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrades, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile."
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19th-century poets from the United States20th-century poets from the United StatesPoets from Massachusetts
Original Language: English
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Spoken at Thayer's tenth anniversary reunion at Harvard, 1895, as quoted in "American Heritage," (December 1968).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ernest_Thayer
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Ernest Thayer
Ernest Lawrence Thayer (Lawrence, Massachusetts, August 14, 1863 - August 21, 1940) was an American writer and poet who wrote "Casey at the Bat". Raised in Worcester, he graduated magna cum laude in philosophy from Harvard in 1885, where he was editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Its business manager, William Randolph Hearst, hired Thayer as humor columnist for the San Francisco Examiner 1886-88.
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Ernest Thayer →
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