Archive

Quotes

The money market is to a commercial nation what the heart is to man.

—William Pitt, 1805

A garden must be looked into, and dressed as the body.

—George Herbert, 1640

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

—John Updike, 1963

Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

—George Santayana, c. 1905

The wonderful sea charmed me from the first.

—Joshua Slocum, 1900

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

—Albert Einstein, 1936

Everybody says it; and what everybody says must be true.

—James Fenimore Cooper, 1844

Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.

—Sigmund Freud, 1930

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.

—Molière, 1670

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

—Erica Jong, 1973

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.

—Bion of Smyrna, c. 100 BC

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992