Let us make our own mistakes, but let us take comfort in the knowledge that they are our own mistakes.
—Tom Mboya, 1958
Archive
Quotes
True friendship withstands time, distance, and silence.
—Isabel Allende, 2000They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.
—Martin Luther, c. 1530The 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, 1840My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810The only function of a school is to make self-education easier.
—Isaac Asimov, 1974For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.
—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCIf a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420Those who cross the seas change their climate but not their character.
—Roman proverbThe best quarantine is hygiene.
—Richard D. Arnold, 1871He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1786There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871