Archive

Quotes

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.

—Rebecca West, 1912

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters.

—Jonathan Swift, 1710

The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms. 

—Frantz Fanon, 1961

What is the city but the people?

—William Shakespeare, 1608

All of life is a foreign country.

—Jack Kerouac, 1949

In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins its case.

—Rwandan proverb

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.

—Saint Augustine, c. 387

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

—Jane Austen, 1815

All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.

—Jack London, 1912

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

—Agnes Repplier, 1916

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930