All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.
—Jack London, 1912
Archive
Quotes
Words pay no debts.
—William Shakespeare, 1601When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
—St. Jerome, 395The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCRevolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCOne of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
—E.B. White, 1958To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
—Nell Scovell, 1991History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.
—Ellsworth Huntington, 1919These useless men ought to be cut up and served at a banquet. I really believe that athletes have less intelligence than swine.
—Dio Chrysostom, c. 95Travelers, poets, and liars are three words all of one significance.
—Richard Brathwaite, 1631The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921