To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.
—Plutarch, c. 100
Archive
Quotes
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.
—Sammy Davis Jr., 1965Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
—Zadie Smith, 2000If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley, 1926You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
—Leon TrotskyA functioning police state needs no police.
—William S. Burroughs, 1959A miracle entails a degree of irrationality—not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, 1952On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
—Winston Churchill, 1945To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the need for thought.
—Henri Poincaré, 1903The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941