Archive

Quotes

Better no law than no law enforced.

—Danish proverb

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

—Maori proverb

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

—E. R. Dodds, 1951

Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.

—Robert A. Heinlein, 1984

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992

To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1975

The king times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end.

—Lord Byron, 1821

Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.

—Thomas Hughes, 1857

They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.

—Virgil, c. 30 BC

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

—Jean Genet, 1949

“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, 1964

This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.

—Tony Blair, 2006