Some things are privileged from jest—namely, religion, matters of state, great persons, all men’s present business of importance, and any case that deserves pity.
—Francis Bacon, 1597
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Quotes
You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
—Walter Lippmann, 1913Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
—Jean Paul, 1795Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.
—Claude Monet, 1908One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—Virginia Woolf, 1929Strangers are an endangered species.
—Adrienne Rich, 1980If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1949The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.
—Che Guevara, 1968