A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers; and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
—Josiah Tucker, 1766
Archive
Quotes
With the dead there is no rivalry.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1839Credulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.
—Joseph Joubert, 1811Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of Man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.
—George Herbert, 1651War is the child of pride, and pride the daughter of riches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1697Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.
—Federico Fellini, c. 1950Charity is murder and you know it.
—Dorothy Parker, 1956I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1807There are many civil questions that arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled.
—William Howard Taft, 1921One may like the love and despise the lover.
—George Farquhar, 1706