Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903
Archive
Quotes
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
—B.F. Skinner, 1964The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.
—Susan Sontag, 1963We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
—John Locke, 1690The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Fate leads the willing and drags along those who hang back.
—Cleanthes, c. 250 BCKings and fools know no law.
—German proverbWe should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847Business? Why, it’s very simple; business is other people’s money.
—Alexandre Dumas, 1857The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.
—Paul Johnson, 1989Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580