Archive

Quotes

Better no law than no law enforced.

—Danish proverb

This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.

—Tony Blair, 2006

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

—Jean Genet, 1983

The universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962

This is Year Zero.

—Pol Pot, 1975

A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.

—Saul Bellow, 1989

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

The law looks at no one’s face.

—Gabriel Okara, 1964

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

—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

—Walter Lippmann, 1913

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

—Denis Diderot, 1774

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

—Muhammad, c. 630

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665