The law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
—Voltairine de Cleyre, 1890
Archive
Quotes
It is hell to belong to a suppressed minority.
—Claude McKay, 1937The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.
—John Henry Poynting, 1899You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.
—Thomas Traherne, c. 1670The body says what words cannot.
—Martha Graham, 1985Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.
—Samuel Johnson, c. 1770No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.
—Horace, 20 BCThe almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
—Theodor Adorno, 1951Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.
—Hans Christian Andersen, 1837I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
—Jack Kerouac, 1957Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1916When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC