If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
—Samuel Johnson, 1777
Archive
Quotes
We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
—Pablo Picasso, 1964A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
—Ouida, 1880I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
—Jack Kerouac, 1957I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.
—Walt Whitman, 1842Dread attends the unknown.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1998If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1513If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?
—Olive Schreiner, 1883It would seem that in history it’s never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.
—Sybille Bedford, 1963The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987Democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.
—Margaret Halsey, 1946