Archive

Quotes

Revolutions never go backward.

—Thomas Skidmore, 1829

If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.

—Charles Dickens, 1865

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

—Francis Bacon, 1605

Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.

—Hans Christian Andersen, 1837

When arms speak, the laws are silent.

—Cicero, 52 BC

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

To eat is to appropriate by destruction.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1911

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

—George Gershwin, 1933

How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”

—Persius, c. 60

He who has nothing has no friends.

—Greek proverb

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

One may like the love and despise the lover.

—George Farquhar, 1706