Archive

Quotes

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.

—Brigitte Bardot, 1989

Death from the bubonic plague is rated, with crucifixion, among the nastiest human experiences of all.

—Guy R. Williams, 1975

It is permitted to learn even from an enemy.

—Ovid, c. 8

My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.

—John Quincy Adams, 1844

It is not right for a ruler who has the nation in his charge, a man with so much on his mind, to sleep all night.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

—Frantz Fanon, 1952

Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are without clothes.

—Pliny the Elder, 77

To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1983

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762