Archive

Quotes

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, c. 1940

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

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

—David Sedaris, 2004

The march of the human mind is slow.

—Edmund Burke, 1775

Water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element.

—Christopher Hitchens, 2008

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

—Carl Sandburg, 1934

Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.

—Miriam Makeba, 1988

People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.

—Richard Nixon, 1975

And what will history say of me a thousand years hence?

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 59 BC

When arms speak, the laws are silent.

—Cicero, 52 BC

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.

—Martin Luther

Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

—Gerald Priestland, 1988