A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000
Archive
Quotes
Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
—Vegetius, c. 385Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.
—Jean-Luc Godard, 1966If you were to ask me if I’d ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I’d have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire, 1852If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
—Margaret Atwood, 2005Every gift has a personality—that of its giver.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1992Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903When you name yourself, you always name another.
—Bertolt Brecht, 1926Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation.
—Oliver Sacks, 2012