Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
—Elias Canetti, 1960
Archive
Quotes
Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.
—Larry Kramer, 1992Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Friendship is a plant that loves the sun—thrives ill under clouds.
—Bronson Alcott, 1872Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
—William Blake, 1793We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.
—Bill Gates, 1995The earth is our existence, and our body is attached to the earth.
—Daulat Qazi, c. 1650Men, my dear, are very queer animals—a mixture of horse nervousness, ass stubbornness, and camel malice.
—T. H. Huxley, 1895Better a thousand enemies outside the house than one inside.
—Arabic proverbWhen a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”
—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860