Archive

Quotes

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

—Abraham Lincoln, c. 1858

How like to us is that filthy beast the ape.

—Cicero, 45 BC

Time will reveal everything. It is a babbler and speaks even when not asked.

—Euripides, c. 425 BC

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

—E.B. White, 1958

Civilization, a much-abused word, stands for a high matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights.

—Edith Hamilton, 1930

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

—Noël Coward, 1930

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

—Fernando Pessoa, c. 1935

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.

—William James, 1902

Youth, youth, springtime of beauty.

—Anthem of the National Fascist Party, c. 1924

What water gives, water takes away.

—Portuguese proverb

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.

—German proverb