Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784
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Quotes
A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967I would delight in music, but the music is discordant.
—Xie Lingyun, c. 425Make human nature your study wherever you reside—whatever the religion or the complexion, study their hearts.
—Ignatius Sancho, 1778Lord, I do not ask that thou shouldst give me wealth; only show me where it is, and I will attend to the rest.
—Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1898I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.
—Maya Angelou, 2011Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923I think heaven will not be as good as earth, unless it bring with it that sweet power to remember, which is the staple of heaven here.
—Emily Dickinson, 1879No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.
—Plautus, c. 180 BC