Archive

Quotes

People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.

—Hipponax, c. 550 BC

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority.

—Claude McKay, 1937

Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

Nobody works as hard for his money as the man who marries it.

—Kin Hubbard

If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.

—Congolese proverb

Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1911

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

—John Updike, 1963

You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. 

—William Randolph Hearst, 1898

Living is an ailment that is relieved every sixteen hours by sleep. A palliative. Death is the cure.

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1790

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

—Walt Whitman, 1856

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.

—Henri Poincaré, 1903