The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000
Archive
Quotes
This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.
—Horace, c. 35 BCI never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.
—Anna Sewell, 1877The sea hath fish for every man.
—William Camden, 1605It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.
—Thucydides, 410 BCThis country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
—John Berger, 1972You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1776We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink, for dining alone is leading the life of a lion or wolf.
—Epicurus, c. 300 BCThe Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.
—Che Guevara, 1968What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971