Archive

Quotes

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

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

—Richard Nixon, 1975

No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

—George Sand, 1851

A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.

—Ethiopian proverb

The human working stock is of interest only insofar as it is profitable.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1970

The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.

—Nadine Gordimer, 1971

One may like the love and despise the lover.

—George Farquhar, 1706

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

—Alice James, 1889

I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1789

Rivalry adds so much to the charms of one’s conquests.

—Louisa May Alcott, 1866

I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1855

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

—Andrea Dworkin, 1983