Archive

Quotes

Best is water.

—Pindar, 476 BC

The sea is mother-death, and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

—Anne Sexton, 1971

All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law.

—James Joyce, 1939

What one man can invent another can discover.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

—Francis Bacon, 1605

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605

The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

—Bertrand Russell, 1938

Exchange is no robbery.

—German proverb

There is a vital force in rumor. Though crushed to earth, to all intents and purposes buried, it can rise again without apparent effort.

—Eleanor Robson Belmont, 1957

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

—Winston Churchill, 1943

’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

It is better to live unknown to the law.

—Irish proverb

What, 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, 1855