Archive

Quotes

If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.

—David Sedaris, 2004

Big head, little wit.

—French proverb

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

—Francis Bacon, 1615

Friendship’s a noble name, ’tis love refined.

—Susanna Centlivre, 1703

Where shall I, of wandering weary, find my resting place at last?

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

Exchange is no robbery.

—German proverb

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

—Gore Vidal, 1973

Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

—Sappho, c. 600 BC

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.

—Vladimir Nabokov, 1941

Profit is profit even in Mecca.

—Nigerian proverb

Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.

—Margaret Cavendish, 1655

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

—George W. Bush, 2004