Archive

Quotes

Labor is no disgrace.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1755

Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it—have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.

—James Russell Lowell, 1884

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1776

Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.

—George Savile, c. 1690

Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.

—Thomas Hughes, 1857

We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction.

—Aesop, c. 600 BC

Happiness is no laughing matter.

—Richard Whately, 1843

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.

—Brigitte Bardot, 1989

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

—Marguerite Duras, 1987

More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

—Plato, c. 378 BC

Mammon, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1911