What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855
Archive
Quotes
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.
—Francis Picabia, 1949Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCAs matron and mistress will differ in temper and tone, so will the friend be distinct from the faithless parasite.
—Horace, c. 20 BCTrade is a social act.
—John Stuart Mill, 1859One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCA traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.
—Gaston Bachelard, 1960Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920I count myself in nothing else so happy / As in a soul remembering my good friends.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595Animals are good to think with.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962