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
Archive
Quotes
Sex: in America, an obsession; in other parts of the world, a fact.
—Marlene Dietrich, 1962Those who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.
—Heraclitus, c. 500 BCThe mill will never grind with water that is past.
—Daniel McCallum, 1870Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, 1946Despotism achieves great things illegally; democracy doesn’t even take the trouble to achieve small things legally.
—Honoré de Balzac, 1831Man is a troublesome animal and therefore is not very manageable.
—Plato, c. 349 BCUnfortunately, humanitarianism has been the mark of an inhuman time.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1932It’s the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy.
—Helen MacInnes, 1963Once a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing.
—Tacitus, c. 100True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
—Edith Wharton, 1924Hang work! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that Indolence—indefeasible Indolence—is the true state of man.
—Charles Lamb, 1805When man wanted to make a machine that would walk, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg.
—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917