Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
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Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1630As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994Casting lots causes contentions to cease, and keeps the mighty apart.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCThe legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835I 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, 1970History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the level of the lower animals.
—Malcolm X, 1964Avoid the law—the first loss is generally the least.
—Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, 1844We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880With the dead there is no rivalry.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1839Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860