Archive

Quotes

You can steal a lot more with a computer than with a gun.

—Gina Smith, 1997

I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.

—Jack Kerouac, 1957

The law looks at no one’s face.

—Gabriel Okara, 1964

There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.

—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC

Let us have peace, but let us have liberty, law, and justice first.

—Frederick Douglass, 1878

He who travels by sea is nothing but a worm on a piece of wood, a trifle in the midst of a powerful creation. The waters play about with him at will, and no one but God can help him.

—Muhammad as-Saffar, 1846

Knowledge itself is power.

—Francis Bacon, 1597

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.

—Marcel Proust, 1919

Animals are good to think with.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849

Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations.

—William Robertson, 1769

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

—Samuel Johnson, 1750

Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.

—Simone Weil, 1943