In every human breast, God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.
—Phillis Wheatley, 1774
Archive
Quotes
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
—Zadie Smith, 2000The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.
—Ferdinand Magellan, c. 1510A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are without clothes.
—Pliny the Elder, 77Jests and scoffs do lessen majesty and greatness and should be far from great personages and men of wisdom.
—Henry Peacham, 1622In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878We should always presume the disease to be curable until its own nature proves it otherwise.
—Peter Mere Latham, c. 1845Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.
—John Huston, 1950The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
—George Orwell, 1944