Archive

Quotes

I looked and there was a pale green horse! Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed with him.

—Book of Revelations, c. 90

He who sings frightens away his ills.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them.

—Denis Diderot, 1777

The sea hath no king but God alone.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

—Albert Camus, 1951

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855

Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?

—Tertullian, c. 215

Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.

—Thomas Gouge, 1672

No one’s serious at seventeen.

—Arthur Rimbaud, 1870

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858

Money is mourned with deeper sorrow than friends or kindred.

—Juvenal, 128