To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.
—Plautus, c. 200 BC
Archive
Quotes
Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCThe fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
—Bertrand Russell, 1938Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
—Jane Austen, 1815Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake.
—Ovid, 10There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCFor most of us, nighttime dreaming brings us closer to our identities and our power than any activity in the waking world.
—Walter Mosley, 2000Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905Water its living strength first shows, / When obstacles its course oppose.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815He that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will.
—Francis Bacon, c. 1600This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.
—Plautus, c. 200 BC