Archive

Quotes

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

—James Russell Lowell, c. 1865

The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.

—Moses Mendelssohn, 1783

It’s the end of the world every day, for someone.

—Margaret Atwood, 2000

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.

—Virginia Woolf, 1927

What is life but organized energy?

—Arthur C. Clarke, 1958

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

—John Locke, 1695

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

—Raymond Chandler, 1945

Kings and fools know no law.

—German proverb

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

—Florence King, 1989