In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
—Michel Foucault, 1975
Archive
Quotes
What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?
—Mary Renault, 1956There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
—George Eliot, 1859The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.
—W. Russell Brain, 1952A joke is at most a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.
—George Orwell, 1945Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1847I have given up considering happiness as relevant.
—Edward Gorey, 1974By night an atheist half believes a God.
—Edward Young, c. 1745When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.
—Thomas Nashe, 1594Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?
—Victor Hugo, 1862Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1928As he brews, so shall he drink.
—Ben Jonson, 1598Good fortune is light as a feather, but nobody knows how to hold it up. Misfortune is heavy as the earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of its way.
—Zhuangzi, c. 300 BC