Archive

Quotes

I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.

—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, “He is better off.”

—Edgar Watson Howe, 1911

How like to us is that filthy beast the ape.

—Cicero, 45 BC

The world is made of the very stuff of the body.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1961

Anyone who’s never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

—John Osborne, 1956

Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.

—Che Guevara, 1965

What one man can invent another can discover.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905

Men are generally more pleased with a widespread than with a great reputation.

—Pliny the Younger, c. 110

Time robs us of all, even of memory.

—Virgil, c. 40 BC

The fox knows lots of tricks, the hedgehog only one—but it’s a winner.

—Archilochus, c. 650 BC

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.

—W.H. Auden, 1946

The gratitude is greater than the gift.

—Pierre Corneille, 1641

Wit enables us to act rudely with impunity.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678