Archive

Quotes

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

—Dong Zhongshu, c. 120 BC

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

—Molière, 1672

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

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

—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858

Words pay no debts.

—William Shakespeare, 1601

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

—Arthur Miller, 1961

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

—Orson Welles, 1953

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

—Bertrand Russell, 1961

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840