Archive

Quotes

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

—Fernando Pessoa, c. 1935

He knows the water best who has waded through it.

—Danish proverb

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

—Denis Diderot, 1774

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.

—Bill Gates, 1995

A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.

—Susan Sontag, 1977

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

All our enemies are mortal.

—Paul Valéry, 1942

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

Till taught by pain, / Men really know not what good water’s worth.

—Lord Byron, 1819

Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.

—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305

Travelers, poets, and liars are three words all of one significance.

—Richard Brathwaite, 1631