Archive

Quotes

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

Not all heads have a brain.

—French proverb

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

Wit enables us to act rudely with impunity.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

—Walt Whitman, 1855

Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.

—Jacob Burckhardt, c. 1875

There is no small pleasure in sweet water.

—Ovid, c. 10

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.

—Euripides, 431 BC

A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

—Mark Twain, c. 1900