I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.
—Sarah Williams, 1868
Archive
Quotes
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902Everyone knows about everybody in Hollywood—who sleeps with whom, who doesn’t sleep, who does it standing on his head or in the dentist’s chair.
—Rock Hudson, 1982An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.
—Margaret Mead, 1972Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838Enemies to me are the sauce piquant to my dish of life.
—Elsa Maxwell, 1955“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964I do desire we may be better strangers.
—William Shakespeare, 1600What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.
—Suketu Mehta, 2019Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
—E.B. White, 1944Men were born to lie, and women to believe them.
—John Gay, 1728