Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1928
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Quotes
We get a deal o’ useless things about us, only because we’ve got the money to spend.
—George Eliot, 1860My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902The elephant, although a gross beast, is yet the most decent and most sensible of any other upon earth. Although he never changes his female, and hath so tender a love for her whom he hath chosen, yet he never couples with her but at the end of every three years, and then only for the space of five days.
—St. Francis de Sales, 1609As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994I have always been of the mind that in a democracy, manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie knife.
—James Russell Lowell, 1873We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time’s carcass.
—Karl Marx, 1847I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.
—Groucho Marx, 1959I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953The freedom or immunity from coercion in matters religious, which is the endowment of persons as individuals, is also to be recognized as their right when they act in community. Religious communities are a requirement of the social nature both of man and of religion itself.
—Pope Paul VI, 1965The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888Very shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.
—Andy Warhol, 1975