If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962
Archive
Quotes
A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
—George Eliot, 1859I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.
—Diane Arbus, c. 1950I am weary of friends, and friendships are all monsters.
—Jonathan Swift, 1710If they prescribe a lot of remedies for some sickness or other, it means that the sickness is incurable.
—Anton Chekhov, 1904Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.
—Lawrence Durrell, 1957Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will.
—Slogan of the National Labor Union of the United States, 1866One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours.
—William Faulkner, 1958Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
—André Gide, 1897Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958No wise man ever wished to be younger.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706