Archive

Quotes

Nature is the art of God.

—Thomas Browne, 1635

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

—George Moore, 1888

One man’s loss is another man’s profit.

—Michel de Montaigne, c. 1580

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

—Milan Kundera, 1990

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!

—Philip Roth, 1969

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.

—August Strindberg, 1886

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

—Max Born, 1968

I am not Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world.

—Socrates, c. 420 BC

If you are truly serious about preparing your child for the future, don’t teach him to subtract—teach him to deduct.

—Fran Lebowitz, 1981

Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC