Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.
—Theodore Roszak, 1972Quotes
One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170It is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.
—Plautus, c. 193 BCNothing from nothing ever yet was born.
—Lucretius, c. 58 BCThat which is evil is soon learned.
—John Ray, 1670Necessity knows no law except to conquer.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCMen have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
—David Brower, 1992Those who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.
—Heraclitus, c. 500 BCBrains are the only things worth having in this world.
—L. Frank Baum, 1899Commerce has made all winds her ministers.
—John Sterling, 1843I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955