Archive

Quotes

The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.

—Nadine Gordimer, 1971

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954

An ugly sight, a man who’s afraid. 

—Jean Anouilh, 1944

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

Brains are the only things worth having in this world.

—L. Frank Baum, 1899

How like to us is that filthy beast the ape.

—Cicero, 45 BC

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1911

Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.

—Voltaire, 1764

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward VIII, 1957

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

—Oscar Wilde, 1893

A broken friendship may be soldered but will never be sound.

—Thomas Fuller, 1732

All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1849