Archive

Quotes

Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.

—Hans Zinsser, 1935

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

—Donald Barthelme, 1964

There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957

Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.

—Bian Qiao, c. 500 BC

In the Middle Ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

—Robert Runcie, 1988

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

I’ve got some shit I’m conservative about and some shit I’m liberal about. Crime—I’m conservative. Prostitution—I’m liberal.

—Chris Rock, 2008

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

—Tennessee Williams, 1953

I do love cricket—it’s so very English.

—Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1908

Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

—George Washington, 1796