To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
—Georges Bataille, 1957
Archive
Quotes
Pushing someone toward liberty does not set her free; taking the chains off a prisoner does not give him freedom.
—Ken Bugul, 1982If the people be the governors, who shall be governed?
—John Cotton, c. 1636To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872I proclaim night more truthful than the day.
—Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1956To live outside the law you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan, 1966If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?
—Voltaire, c. 1732I am ill every time it blows hard, and nothing but my enthusiastic love for the profession keeps me one hour at sea.
—Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1804Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.
—Bill Gates, 1995The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1919Dance tunes are always right.
—Dylan Thomas, 1936