Archive

Quotes

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

—Paul Johnson, 1989

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do.

—William James, 1902

Do you suppose it possible to know democracy without knowing the people?

—Xenophon, c. 370 BC

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

—Agnes Repplier, 1916

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1861

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

—German proverb

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

—Rumi, c. 1250

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.

—William Blake, 1807

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.

—Elizabeth I, 1588

I’ve got some shit I’m conservative about and some shit I’m liberal about. Crime—I’m conservative. Prostitution—I’m liberal.

—Chris Rock, 2008

Revolutions are always verbose.

—Leon Trotsky, 1933

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

—Leviticus, c. 600 BC