Archive

Quotes

Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.

—Horace Walpole, 1745

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.

—Rebecca West, 1912

Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.

—Alain de Lille, c. 1200

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.

—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987

Oil! Our secret god, our secret sharer, our magic wand, fulfiller of our every desire, our coconspirator, the sine qua non in all we do!

—Margaret Atwood, 2015

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

—Eugene V. Debs, 1905

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868

Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.

—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908

Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.

—Walter Scott, 1823

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

The gods play games with men as balls.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

Doing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

—Roger Ebert, 1998