Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.
—Susan B. Anthony, 1896
Archive
Quotes
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 BCI 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, 1955The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922Those from whom we were born have long since departed, and those with whom we grew up exist only in memory. We, too, through the approach of death, become, as it were, trees growing on the sandy bank of a river.
—Bhartrihari, c. 400One religion is as true as another.
—Robert Burton, 1621The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1817I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones.
—David Hume, 1751I have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830Never make a defense or apology before you be accused.
—Charles I, 1636I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.
—Herodotus, c. 440 BCThe newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858