Archive

Quotes

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

—Samuel Johnson, 1780

Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.

—Thomas Carlyle, 1838

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

—Marcel Marceau, 1958

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

—Bertrand Russell, 1961

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

—Arthur Miller, 1961

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

—Albert Camus, 1957

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

—E.M. Forster, 1910

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

—Robert Burton, 1621

The more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.

—Plato, c. 375 BC

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

—Martin Heidegger, 1949

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

—Virginia Woolf, 1899