Archive

Quotes

For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

—Jane Austen, 1813

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600

I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.

—Al Capone, 1929

All revolutions devour their own children.

—Ernst Röhm, 1933

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; for what we wish, that we readily believe.

—Demosthenes, 349 BC

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

—Pausanias, c. 450 BC

Education—a debt due from present to future generations.

—George Peabody, 1852

Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

—Maya Angelou, 1986

Do we want laurels for ourselves most, / Or most that no one else shall have any?

—Amy Lowell, 1922

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

—Luis Buñuel, 1983