You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
—Walter Lippmann, 1913
Archive
Quotes
We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brain in this country to turn it around.
—Donald Trump, 2015An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
—Henry Clay, 1842Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
—Tennessee Williams, 1951Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.
—Matsuo Basho, c. 1685New things are always ugly.
—Willa Cather, 1921Disease is not of the body but of the place.
—Latin proverbMemories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978If 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. 420Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCSpit not in the well; you may have to drink its water.
—French proverbWater, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878