Archive

Quotes

Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

—Dorothy M. Richardson, 1923

Superstitions are habits rather than beliefs.

—Marlene Dietrich, 1962

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.

—Booth Tarkington, 1914

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

—Aristophanes, c. 424 BC

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

—Samuel Johnson, 1773

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881

Too often, where we need water we find guns.

—Ban Ki-moon, 2008

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

—Oscar Wilde, 1893