Archive

Quotes

Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1910

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

—John Updike, 1963

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1735

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

—Abraham Lincoln, c. 1858

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men, but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

—Joseph Addison, 1711

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.

—Dora Russell, 1983

When nature is overriden, she takes her revenge.

—Marya Mannes, 1958

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

—David Foster Wallace, 2000

The god of music dwelleth out of doors.

—Edith M. Thomas, 1887

I drink for the thirst to come.

—François Rabelais, 1535

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?

—Victor Hugo, 1862