Archive

Quotes

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

—Mao Zedong, 1938

In times of pestilence, gaiety and joyousness are most profitable.

—Jacme d’Agramont, 1348

Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”

—Evelyn Waugh, 1938

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

—John F. Kennedy, 1962

When poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.

—Antiphanes, c. 350 BC

It is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.

—Plautus, c. 193 BC

One of the things men should most strive to do is win a good reputation and see that no one questions it.

—Juan Manuel, 1335

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities.

—John Lothrop Motley, 1858

The body says what words cannot.

—Martha Graham, 1985

The future...something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

—C.S. Lewis, 1941

As matron and mistress will differ in temper and tone, so will the friend be distinct from the faithless parasite.

—Horace, c. 20 BC

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

—Patricia Highsmith, 1960