Archive

Quotes

The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive. 

—Samuel Butler, c. 1888

Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

—Sappho, c. 600 BC

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

—John Berger, 1972

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

When they shout “Long live progress,” always ask, “Progress of what?”

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.

—Francis Bacon, 1620

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

Music is our myth of the inner life.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1942

If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.

—Congolese proverb

If I see something sagging, dragging, or bagging, I’m going to go have the stuff tucked or plucked.

—Dolly Parton, 2003

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

—George Washington, 1796