Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.
—Louis Brandeis, 1928
Archive
Quotes
A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
—Ethiopian proverbThe beginning of health lies in knowing the disease.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.
—Federico Fellini, c. 1950The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
—Théophile Gautier, c. 1835Nobody, sir, dies willingly.
—Antiphanes, c. 370 BCFear has a smell, as love does.
—Margaret Atwood, 1972The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858The law is far, the fist is near.
—Korean proverbIf the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.
—Charles M. Allen, 1967