Archive

Quotes

To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain way of thinking of nothing else.

—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688

The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.

—Paul Valéry, 1931

Water is the readiest means of making friends with nature.

—Ludwig Feuerbach, 1841

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

—Alice James, 1889

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

—Pausanias, c. 450 BC

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Once you hear the details of a victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1951

Everyone else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.

—Shirley Chisholm, 1970

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.

—François Guizot, 1830

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

—Galen, c. 175

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1849