Archive

Quotes

In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.

—Phillis Wheatley, 1774

A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.

—Ouida, 1880

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

The brain is an unreliable organ, it is monstrously great, monstrously developed. Swollen, like a goiter.

—Aleksandr Blok, c. 1920

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1967

There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC

Imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1887

Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

—Dorothy M. Richardson, 1923

My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.

—Benito Mussolini, 1929

Friendship is a plant that loves the sun—thrives ill under clouds.

—Bronson Alcott, 1872

It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority.

—Claude McKay, 1937

I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile.

—Gregory VII, c. 1085