Archive

Quotes

We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.

—Winston Churchill, 1948

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

The fox knows lots of tricks, the hedgehog only one—but it’s a winner.

—Archilochus, c. 650 BC

The sea serves the pirate as well as the trader.

—Prudentius, c. 405

Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so.

—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

—Francis Bacon, 1605

It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority.

—Claude McKay, 1937

People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.

—Hipponax, c. 550 BC

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.

—Mario Puzo, 2001

Music is our myth of the inner life.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1942

Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.

—Alain de Lille, c. 1200