Archive

Quotes

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

—Edward Bellamy, 1888

There was a great deal of drinking among us but little drunkenness. We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront and that we had a moral duty to undermine it.

—Elizabeth Anderson, 1969

I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.

—Phyllis Diller, 1981

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

—Woody Allen, 1979

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

—Robert Wilson, 1991

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.

—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008

The mind of man is capable of anything.

—Guy de Maupassant, 1884

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

Life is the art of being well deceived.

—William Hazlitt, c. 1817

A jest breaks no bones.

—Samuel Johnson, 1781

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939