Petty laws breed great crimes.
—Ouida, 1880
Archive
Quotes
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France, 1881What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971The fear of the Lord is true wisdom, and he who hath it not can in no way penetrate the true secrets of magic.
—Abraham the Jew, c. 1400Do not fear the clatter of wheels, the bumps and slops in corridors. It is only turbulence.
—Romalyn Ante, 2020Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
—Emma Goldman, 1910I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”
—Michel Serres, 1982For sooner will men hold fire in their mouths than keep a secret.
—Petronius, c. 60One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1664Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.
—Robert P. Hudson, 1983Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.
—Agnes Repplier, 1916The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963