Archive

Quotes

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

—Aleksandr Pushkin, 1837

It costs a lot of money to be rich.

—Peter Boyle, 2002

I shall embrace my rival—until I suffocate him.

—Jean Racine, 1669

Luck is believing you’re lucky. 

—William Carlos Williams, 1947

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

—Ray Bradbury, 1992

The men of today are born to criticize; of Achilles they see only the heel.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880

The celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork.

—Johannes Kepler, 1605

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

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

—Mobutu Sese Seko, 1991

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

—Anatole France, 1881

There is something stirring in the way civilization gapes like a savage at the achievements of nature.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865