Archive

Quotes

In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

—Salvador Dalí, 1953

The mill will never grind with water that is past.

—Daniel McCallum, 1870

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

—Herman Melville, 1853

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

Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant—­democracy to many.

—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839

However harmless a thing is, if the law forbids it, most people will think it wrong.

—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

—Herodotus, 440 BC

The enlightened man says: I am body entirely and nothing beside.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

—Robert Burton, 1621

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.

—George Eliot, 1860

Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832