Archive

Quotes

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600

In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins its case.

—Rwandan proverb

Envy is the basis of democracy.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

Governments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.

—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BC

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

Power is so apt to be insolent, and Liberty to be saucy, that they are very seldom upon good terms.

—George Savile, c. 1690

The character which results from wealth is that of a prosperous fool.

—Aristotle, c. 322 BC

Diseases, at least many of them, are like human beings. They are born, they flourish, and they die.

—David Riesman, 1937

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.

—George Herbert, 1651

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

—Bernard De Voto, 1951

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

—André Gide, 1926