Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.
—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868
Archive
Quotes
Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861Reputation, like beavers and cloaks, shall last some people twice the time of others.
—Douglas Jerrold, 1840Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”
—Evelyn Waugh, 1938People who’ve drunk neat wine don’t care a damn.
—Hipponax, c. 550 BCLaws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke, 1765Trade is a social act.
—John Stuart Mill, 1859Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1908Drink does not drown care but waters it, and makes it grow faster.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1749If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCWe seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC