Archive

Quotes

What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?

—William Law, 1728

Egypt was the mother of magicians.

—Clement of Alexandria, c. 200

I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.

—Sophocles, c. 441 BC

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.

—Aphra Behn, 1677

Show me someone who never gossips, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t interested in people.

—Barbara Walters, 1975

In most cases men willingly believe what they wish.

—Julius Caesar, 52 BC

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

—Denis Diderot, 1774

Man is no man, but a wolf, to a stranger.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

—George Orwell, 1944

Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.

—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908

Music sweeps by me as a messenger / Carrying a message that is not for me.

—George Eliot, 1868

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930