Archive

Quotes

If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little.

—Mobutu Sese Seko, 1991

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

—Ira Berkow, 1987

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

—George Eliot, 1857

People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.

—Richard Nixon, 1975

The world is made of the very stuff of the body.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1961

Some memories are like lucky charms, talismans, one shouldn’t tell about them or they’ll lose their power.

—Iris Murdoch, 1985

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

—John Henry Poynting, 1899

Communities do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1863

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

—Sammy Davis Jr., 1965

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

—Cormac McCarthy, 1992

One may like the love and despise the lover.

—George Farquhar, 1706

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1810