Archive

Quotes

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

—George Santayana, 1905

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.

—Edmund Burke, 1795

The fear of the Lord is true wisdom, and he who hath it not can in no way penetrate the true secrets of magic.

—Abraham the Jew, c. 1400

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

—James Madison, 1794

The tune I remember, could I but keep the words.

—Virgil, 38 BC

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

What is the city but the people?

—William Shakespeare, 1608

Luck is believing you’re lucky. 

—William Carlos Williams, 1947

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

—Camille Paglia, 1992

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

—Karl Kraus, 1909