It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515
Archive
Quotes
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
—Zadie Smith, 2000You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.
—Xenocrates, c. 350 BCThere is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1790A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
—Ethiopian proverbThe important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst thing you could say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death.
—Woody Allen, 1975Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.
—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
—Judge Learned Hand, 1944“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W.H. Auden, 1957My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
—Winston Churchill, 1939