Archive

Quotes

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

—Arthur Miller, 2001

See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.

—Robert Burton, c. 1620

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1790

We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers.

—Winston Churchill, 1948

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them. 

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

As is the face, so is the mind.

—Roman proverb

What is the city but the people?

—William Shakespeare, 1608

Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.

—Bayard Rustin, 1965

I always think of nature as a great spectacle, somewhat resembling the opera.

—Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.

—Colette, 1944

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

—Aldous Huxley, 1956

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

—Lucretius, c. 58 BC

Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that.

—Mao Zedong, 1936