Archive

Quotes

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.

—Hunter S. Thompson, 1971

For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

—Herman Melville, 1851

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

—Emma Goldman, 1917

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990

Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

—Luis Buñuel, 1983

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

—Desmond Tutu, 1984

We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

—Maori proverb

The merchant always has fresh losses to expect, and the dread of base poverty forbids his rest.

—Decimus Magnus Ausonius, c. 390

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

—Herodotus, c. 440 BC