Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies.
—H.L. Mencken, 1925
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Quotes
The United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water.
—Charles P. Berkey, 1946Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905It is so difficult not to become vain about one’s own good luck.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1963The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.
—Herodotus, c. 440 BCIndustrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.
—Dora Russell, 1983If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing—that’s the Lord’s test.
—Mahalia Jackson, 1966The money we have is the means to liberty; that which we pursue is the means to slavery.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, c. 1770I 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, 1863The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.
—W. Russell Brain, 1952