Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
—Arnold Toynbee, 1948
Archive
Quotes
The 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, 1921It is strange indeed that the more we learn about how to build health, the less healthy Americans become.
—Adelle Davis, 1951An exile with no home anywhere is a corpse without a grave.
—Publilius Syrus, 50 BCHowever harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it, most people will think it wrong.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.
—William Randolph Hearst, 1898Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand.
We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
—Oscar Wilde, 1887Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
—Jean Paul, 1795If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.
—Woody Allen, 1979The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
—Gustave Flaubert, 1871It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904