Archive

Quotes

The money market is to a commercial nation what the heart is to man.

—William Pitt, 1805

We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.

—Joseph Addison, 1711

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

—Arnold Toynbee, 1948

It is permitted to learn even from an enemy.

—Ovid, c. 8

Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.

—Derek Walcott, 1986

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

—Cormac McCarthy, 2005

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1861

When we define democracy now, it must still be as a thing hoped for but not seen.

—Pearl S. Buck, 1941

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

—James Joyce, 1922

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939

Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

—H.G. Wells, 1905