Archive

Quotes

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

—Théophile Gautier, c. 1835

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

—Walt Whitman, 1842

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

—Carl Sandburg, 1959

After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams.

—E.M. Cioran, 1949

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

—Doris Lessing, 1994

Only the little people pay taxes.

—Leona Helmsley, 1989

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BC

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

—Edmund Burke, 1765

Dance tunes are always right.

—Dylan Thomas, 1936

People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.

—Hipponax, c. 550 BC