Archive

Quotes

The deed is everything, the glory naught.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

No one wins a quarrel by quarreling.

—German proverb

Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.

—William Empson, 1928

In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.

—Charles Lamb, 1810

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

—Herman Melville, 1851

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886

A garden must be looked into, and dressed as the body.

—George Herbert, 1640

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1862

Attacks on me will do no harm, and silent contempt is the best answer to them.

—James Monroe, 1808

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935