Revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957
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Quotes
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925I have been a stranger here in my own land all my life.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCAs bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.
—David Sedaris, 1997Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962Credulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.
—Joseph Joubert, 1811I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886The period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.
—George Washington, 1786Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
—Simone Weil, 1947No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that.
—Mao Zedong, 1936The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835