A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
—Victor Hugo, 1862
Archive
Quotes
Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1630Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.
—Rachel Carson, 1962An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840Revolutions are always verbose.
—Leon Trotsky, 1933Children are all foreigners. We treat them as such.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1839If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.
—Francis Bacon, 1615The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1962In settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church, by a Frenchman a fort, by a Dutchman a warehouse, and by an Englishman an alehouse.
—Francis Grose, 1787When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.
Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
—Ralph Nader, 2000A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967