If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962
Archive
Quotes
Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
—Epictetus, c. 100I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.
—Virginia Woolf, 1931Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
—William Hazlitt, 1819An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.
—Epicurus, c. 250 BCThe best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.
—Chinua Achebe, 1960Without a decisive naval force, we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.
—George Washington, 1781If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.
—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977The more laws, the more lawbreakers.
—Tao Te Ching, c. 500 BCThe breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
—Vladimir Nabokov, 1941Today’s friend may be tomorrow’s foe.
—Sophocles, 440 BC