We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.
—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845
Archive
Quotes
The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
—Nell Scovell, 1991Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
—Evelyn Waugh, 1963If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?
—Voltaire, c. 1732I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1789What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110The bathing was so delightful this morning, and Molly so pressing with me to enjoy myself, that I believe I stayed in rather too long, as since the middle of the day I have felt unreasonably tired. I shall be more careful another time, and shall not bathe tomorrow as I had before intended.
—Jane Austen, 1804Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890Colonialism has meant selling our ore and being left with the holes.
—Samora Moisés Machel, c. 1976There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal, than this race for profit.
—Helen Keller, 1928