There are many civil questions that arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled.
—William Howard Taft, 1921
Archive
Quotes
To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.
—Leonard Cohen, 1970The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.
—Johannes Kepler, 1605Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
—Henry Miller, 1945If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley, 1926To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.
—Plutarch, c. 100The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.
—Molière, 1670You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.
—Chinese proverbWhat can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.
—Susan B. Anthony, 1896