You must not grow used to making money out of everything. One sees more people ruined than one has seen preserved by shameful gains.
—Sophocles, c. 442 BC
Archive
Quotes
All that we know is nothing can be known.
—Lord Byron, 1812We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.
—Bill Gates, 1995Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
—Plato, c. 378 BCThere are places one comes home to that one has never been to.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, 1989If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.
—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75The mere existence of nuclear weapons by the thousands is an incontrovertible sign of human insanity.
—Isaac Asimov, 1988The gods play games with men as balls.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCOne thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCTo put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?
—Brooks Atkinson, 1940If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420