Archive

Quotes

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

—Billie Holiday, 1956

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

—William Blake, c. 1790

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.

—Ulysses S. Grant, 1877

The sleep of reason produces monsters.

—Francisco Goya, 1799

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

—Simone Weil, c. 1940

I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.

—Phyllis Diller, 1981

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

—Honoré de Balzac, 1847

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

—George Eliot, 1857

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

—Leonard Cohen, 1970

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

—Charles Darwin, 1859

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

—Xenophon, c. 370 BC