In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951
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Quotes
I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
—Rebecca West, 1939Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.
—Isadora Duncan, c. 1902The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences—to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.
—William Hazlitt, 1822Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.
—Bayard Rustin, 1965The brightest light burns the quickest.
—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.
—George Savile, c. 1690When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”
—Pausanias, c. 450 BCHad Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
—Blaise Pascal, 1658The worship of opinion is, at this day, the established religion of the United States.
—Harriet Martineau, 1839