I am a living symbol of the white man’s fear.
—Winnie Mandela, 1985
Archive
Quotes
The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.
—Ethel Merman, c. 1955A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
—Rebecca West, 1939A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
—Mitch Hedberg, 1999It is He who has subdued the ocean so that you may eat of its fresh fish and bring up from its depth ornaments to wear. Behold the ships plowing their course through it. All this, that you may seek His bounty and render thanks.
—The Qur’an, c. 625I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.
—Madonna, c. 1985My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.
—Phillis Wheatley, 1774Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.
—Rebecca West, 1959