Archive

Quotes

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

—H.L. Mencken, 1920

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts. 

—Aldous Huxley, 1929

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

Punishment is a sort of medicine.

—Aristotle, c. 340 BC

An ape will be an ape, though clad in purple.

—Erasmus, 1511

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

Ah, there are no children nowadays.

—Molière, 1673

Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.

—Ben Jonson, 1601

In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.

—Novalis, c. 1798

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

—George Santayana, 1905

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1902

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

—Novatian, c. 255

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

—Frantz Fanon, 1952