The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
—L.P. Hartley, 1953
Archive
Quotes
A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
—Albert Einstein, 1929The law looks at no one’s face.
—Gabriel Okara, 1964Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.
—George Orwell, 1945Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.
—Shirley Chisholm, 1970To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
—Ray Bradbury, 1992Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
—Walter Pater, 1873The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.
—Hunter S. Thompson, 1971The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, / And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
—Abraham Cowley, 1656I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1855