Archive

Quotes

Children are all foreigners. We treat them as such.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1839

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—L.P. Hartley, 1953

France has neither winter, summer, nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

—Mark Twain, 1879

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

—Oscar Wilde, 1887

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

—Denis Diderot, 1774

Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.

—Euripides, 431 BC

I do desire we may be better strangers.

—William Shakespeare, 1600

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

—André Gide, 1927

I am a man: I consider nothing human alien to me.

—Terence, 163 BC

No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.

—Woodrow Wilson, 1915

Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

Strangers are an endangered species.

—Adrienne Rich, 1980