Archive

Quotes

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1949

Home is wherever I go.

—Indira Gandhi, 1955

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

—Philip Roth, 1969

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.

—Book of Job, c. 600 BC

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

—Derek Walcott, 1986

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs and believes it civilization.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1911

I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters.

—Jonathan Swift, 1710

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.

—German proverb

Fear is a poor guarantor of a long life.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44

Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children. 

—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

—Mark Twain, 1897

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

—Henry Clay, 1842