Archive

Quotes

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

—Thomas Hobbes, 1679

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1758

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

—Karl Kraus, c. 1910

The hatred of relatives is the bitterest.

—Tacitus, 117

Dance tunes are always right.

—Dylan Thomas, 1936

When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1594

I prefer liberty with unquiet to slavery with quiet.

—Sallust, c. 35 BC

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

—Edith Wharton, 1905

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

—Gertrude Stein, 1937

Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.

—Marty Feldman, 1969

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

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

—John F. Kennedy, 1962