The gods play games with men as balls.
—Plautus, c. 200 BC
Archive
Quotes
In a true democracy, everyone can be upper-class and live in Connecticut.
—Lisa Birnbach, 1980The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
—Aristotle, c. 330 BCMan’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962This 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, 1861My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968How like to us is that filthy beast the ape.
—Cicero, 45 BCNight affords the most convenient shade for works of darkness.
—John Taylor, 1750Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
—William Morris, 1882People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.
—Édouard Manet, c. 1860I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860