I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
—Ray Bradbury, 1992
Archive
Quotes
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.
—Anna Sewell, 1877Fashion, n. A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911Refrigerators and television sets, or even rockets sent to the moon, do not change man into God.
—Czesław Miłosz, 1960Fear is a poor guarantor of a long life.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44I hate the sight of monkeys; they remind me so of poor relations.
—Henry Luttrell, 1820It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.
—Charlotte Brontë, 1847Think rich. Look poor.
—Andy Warhol, 1975Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCI rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.
—The Bible