If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.
—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988
Archive
Quotes
Idolatry is the mother of all games.
—Novatian, c. 255The mind of man is capable of anything.
—Guy de Maupassant, 1884Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying.
—Barbara Ehrenreich, 2008I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830Despotism achieves great things illegally; democracy doesn’t even take the trouble to achieve small things legally.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1831What is life but organized energy?
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1958Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCThe future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
—Paul Valéry, 1931Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.
—Robert Benchley, 1935