Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
—Arthur Miller, 2001
Archive
Quotes
One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.
—Ernst Jünger, 1977’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595The sea hath no king but God alone.
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881Friendship! Sir, there can be no such thing without an equality.
—George Farquhar, 1702My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.
—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.
—Francis Picabia, 1949The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.
—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
—E.B. White, 1977Wants keep pace with wealth always.
—Timothy Titcomb, 1859This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871