Archive

Quotes

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.

—William Bradford, 1630

Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.

—Rachel Carson, 1962

An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

Revolutions are always verbose.

—Leon Trotsky, 1933

Children are all foreigners. We treat them as such.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1839

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

—Francis Bacon, 1615

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1962

In settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church, by a Frenchman a fort, by a Dutchman a warehouse, and by an Englishman an alehouse.

—Francis Grose, 1787

When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1594

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

—Ralph Nader, 2000

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967