God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.
—The Qur’an, c. 620
Archive
Quotes
The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.
—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater.
—Anthony Doerr, 2006My interest is in the future, because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
—Charles F. Kettering, 1946A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside.
—Arabic proverbHe that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much and as little of the war as he will.
—Francis Bacon, c. 1600Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
—Emma Goldman, 1910I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCA large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley, 1934The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
—Leviticus, c. 600 BCMidnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward VIII, 1957