Man’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962
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, 1964Take back your golden fiddles, and we’ll beat to open sea.
—Rudyard Kipling, 1892To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.
—Plutarch, c. 100It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BCLife’s no resting, but a moving.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1795Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390I count myself in nothing else so happy / As in a soul remembering my good friends.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCWhen they shout “Long live progress,” always ask, “Progress of what?”
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
—Winston Churchill, 1939