Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
—Robertson Davies, 1985
Archive
Quotes
History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.
—Ellsworth Huntington, 1919We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.
—Bill Gates, 1995Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1836A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.
—Saint Augustine, 397Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness.
—Thomas Paine, 1792Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1630The future is no more uncertain than the present.
—Walt Whitman, 1856Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.
—Blaise Pascal, 1669Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?
—Dong Zhongshu, c. 120 BCThe United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water.
—Charles P. Berkey, 1946