Archive

Quotes

If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.

—Michael Harrington, 1962

I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.

—Rebecca West, 1939

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back whence we came.

—John F. Kennedy, 1962

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

—William Morris, 1882

Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.

—Peter Hitchcock, 2010

Suffering has its limit, but fears are endless.

—Pliny the Younger, c. 108

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.

—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747

The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature—and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1898

You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. 

—William Randolph Hearst, 1898

The merchant always has fresh losses to expect, and the dread of base poverty forbids his rest.

—Decimus Magnus Ausonius, c. 390

The future is no more uncertain than the present.

—Walt Whitman, 1856