The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972
Archive
Quotes
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
—Gore Vidal, 1981As he brews, so shall he drink.
—Ben Jonson, 1598The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCThe transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1790Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.
—Philip Stubbes, 1583The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.
—Horace, c. 25 BCThe brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
—Victor Hugo, 1862I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers; and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
—Josiah Tucker, 1766