Archive

Quotes

This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.

—Tony Blair, 2006

What will not attract a man’s stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish!

—Richard Burton, 1883

I think it makes small difference to the dead if they are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this is an empty glorification left for those who live.

—Euripides, 415 BC

Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

—Max Born, 1968

One of the things men should most strive to do is win a good reputation and see that no one questions it.

—Juan Manuel, 1335

Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.

—Epictetus, c. 100

An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.

—George Jackson, 1971

He knows the water best who has waded through it.

—Danish proverb

I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.

—Charles Lindbergh, 1948

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851