Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944
Archive
Quotes
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.
—Samuel Johnson, 1771Conjecturing a Climate
Of unsuspended Suns –
Adds poignancy to Winter
If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983The happy ending is our national belief.
—Mary McCarthy, 1947But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
—Genesis, c. 900 BCYou can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880A bad reputation is easy to come by, painful to bear, and difficult to clear.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCTo place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
—Georges Bataille, 1957The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.
—John Henry Poynting, 1899