Archive

Quotes

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

—Gore Vidal, 1981

War has silenced all laws.

—Lucan, c. 65

A god cannot procure death for himself, even if he wished it, which, so numerous are the evils of life, has been granted to man as our chief good.

—Pliny the Elder, c. 77

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

—V.S. Pritchett, 1968

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.

—Thomas Browne, 1658

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing.”

—Daniel Boorstin, 1961

There was a great deal of drinking among us but little drunkenness. We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront and that we had a moral duty to undermine it.

—Elizabeth Anderson, 1969

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

—John Camden Hotten, 1859

I never practice, I always play.

—Wanda Landowska, 1953

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

—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839