My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968
Archive
Quotes
All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
—Paul Valéry, 1931I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886What hath night to do with sleep?
—John Milton, 1637I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
—Voltaire, 1764Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake.
—Ovid, 10If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881