My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1967
Archive
Quotes
The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.
—Tony Blair, 2006If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us but for ours to amuse them.
—Evelyn Waugh, 1963Death from the bubonic plague is rated, with crucifixion, among the nastiest human experiences of all.
—Guy R. Williams, 1975Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.
—Hannah Arendt, 1978Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.
—Socrates, c. 430 BCThe workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.
—Eugene V. Debs, 1905Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
—Juvenal, c. 121While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
—Andrea Dworkin, 1983