Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745
Archive
Quotes
Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
—Rebecca West, 1912Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.
—Alain de Lille, c. 1200Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871A 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, 1987Oil! 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, 2015The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.
—Eugene V. Debs, 1905Great 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, 1868Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.
—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
—Walter Scott, 1823How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”
—Persius, c. 60The gods play games with men as balls.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCDoing research on the web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
—Roger Ebert, 1998