Archive

Quotes

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

—Arthur C. Clarke, 1973

There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal, than this race for profit.

—Helen Keller, 1928

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962

The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BC

Nobody, 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, 1815

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

—Marcel Proust, c. 1922

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

—Søren Kierkegaard, 1850

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all. 

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

—Samuel Johnson, 1780

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

To gaze upon a drop of water is to behold the nature of all the waters of the universe.

—Huangbo Xiyun, c. 850

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

—Roald Dahl, 1990