I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953
Archive
Quotes
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H.G. Wells, 1920Being 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, 1630The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
—Walter Scott, 1823Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.
—Voltaire, 1764To live outside the law, you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan, 1966All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.
—Albert Camus, 1951The happy ending is our national belief.
—Mary McCarthy, 1947Everyone who is sick is someone else’s patient zero.
—Leslie Jamison, 2020There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
—Mark Twain, 1894One who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.
—Ptahhotep, c. 2400 BCThe snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922