Archive

Quotes

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

By night an atheist half believes a God.

—Edward Young, c. 1745

The more laws, the more lawbreakers.

—Tao Te Ching, c. 500 BC

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

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

—Ralph Nader, 2000

Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

—Rudy Giuliani, 1999

If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.

—Henry Clay, 1812

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.

—W.H. Auden, 1962

Health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.

—Helen Keller, 1936

Most authors seek fame, but I seek for justice—a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.

—Davy Crockett, 1834

The enlightened man says: I am body entirely and nothing beside.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

The happy ending is our national belief.

—Mary McCarthy, 1947

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

—Ernest Hemingway, 1929