You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882
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Quotes
If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962As to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of omnipotence, which is not of humankind and understandable, and so the springs of its behavior are hidden.
—H.M. Tomlinson, 1912It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.
—Francis Bacon, 1620The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1821Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.
—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925Time, 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, 1905I’ve got some shit I’m conservative about and some shit I’m liberal about. Crime—I’m conservative. Prostitution—I’m liberal.
—Chris Rock, 2008Water is the first principle of everything.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BCThe work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.
—Leo Tolstoy, 1893