Archive

Quotes

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward VIII, 1957

They say, “We only have the life of this world. We die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time.” Yet, not true knowledge have they of this—only belief.

—The Qur’an, c. 620

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.

—Saint Augustine, c. 387

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing.”

—Daniel Boorstin, 1961

Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.

—Robert P. Hudson, 1983

Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.

—Larry Kramer, 1992

Imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1949

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

—George Moore, 1888

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated has not the art of getting drunk.

—Samuel Johnson, 1779

The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their elders and copying one another.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

—Charles Baudelaire, c. 1865