Archive

Quotes

We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.

—Samuel Pepys, 1661

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

—Hannah Arendt, 1970

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.

—William Penn, 1693

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

—Anaïs Nin, 1939

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.

—Edith Konecky, 1976

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.

—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987

When arms speak, the laws are silent.

—Cicero, 52 BC

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

—Mao Zedong, 1938

Every fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain.

—Clover Adams, 1882

To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864