Archive

Quotes

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.

—Walter Lippmann, 1913

We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brain in this country to turn it around.

—Donald Trump, 2015

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.

—Henry Clay, 1842

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

—Tennessee Williams, 1951

Go 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. 1685

New things are always ugly.

—Willa Cather, 1921

Disease is not of the body but of the place.

—Latin proverb

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

—Harriet Doerr, 1978

If 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. 420

Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

Spit not in the well; you may have to drink its water.

—French proverb

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878