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# Weekend Words: Sign
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-sign/
- Published: 2017-02-26T14:30:24.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:27:49.000Z
- Description: "When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Art, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/02/sign.jpg)

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, “Belshazzar’s Feast” (c.1636), oil on canvas, 168 x 209 cm, National Gallery, London (image via Web Gallery of Art)

This week, *The New York Times* [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/arts/music/lincoln-center-turns-away-woman-wearing-anti-trump-sign.html?%5Fr=0&ref=hyperallergic.com) that a 72-year-old woman named Jenny Heinz, “a longtime Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic subscriber,” was turned away from a performance by the Budapest Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall when she refused to remove an 8-by-11-inch sign affixed to the back of her jacket that read: ‘NO! In the name of humanity we refuse to accept a fascist America.'”

> A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.  
>  
> **—Matthew 16:4 (KJV)**

> Signs may be but the sympathies of nature with man.  
>  
> **—Charlotte Brontë, *Jane Eyre***

> Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’  
> The word within a word, unable to speak a word,  
> Swaddled with darkness.  
>  
> **—T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”**

> If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the “Fuck you” signs in the world. It’s impossible.  
>  
> **—J. D. Salinger, *The Catcher in the Rye***

> He will lie even when it’s inconvenient: the sign of a true artist.  
>  
> **—Gore Vidal**

> The god whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks plainly nor conceals, but indicates by signs.  
>  
> **—Heraclitus**

> Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.  
>  
> **—Blaise Pascal**

> Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.  
>  
> **—Friedrich Nietzsche**

> Give signs, sweet girl, for here are none but friends.  
>  
> **—Shakespeare, *Titus Andronicus***

> The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.  
>  
> **—Henri Matisse**

> Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.  
>  
> **—Anatole France**

> It’s a sure sign of summer if the chair gets up when you do.  
>  
> **—Walter Winchell**

> When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.  
>  
> **—Jonathan Swift, *Thoughts on Various Subjects***

> Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm  
> Nor question much  
> That subtle wreath of hair about mine arm;  
> They mystery, the sign you must not touch,  
> For tis my outward soul.  
>  
> **—John Donne, “Funeral”**

> Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.  
>  
> **—H. L. Mencken**