Archive

Quotes

Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.

—Blaise Pascal, 1658

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside.

—Arabic proverb

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

—Thucydides, 410 BC

All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1849

It is so difficult not to become vain about one’s own good luck.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1963

Nature contains no one constant form.

—Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach, 1770

What is the city but the people?

—William Shakespeare, 1608

I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

—Woody Allen, 1971

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

—Charles Baudelaire, 1852

All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1890