Even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.
—Learned Hand, 1932
Archive
Quotes
Most people who sneer at technology would starve to death if the engineering infrastructure were removed.
—Robert A. Heinlein, 1984By night an atheist half believes a God.
—Edward Young, c. 1745To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.
—Albert Camus, 1951Seafarers go to sleep in the evening not knowing whether they will find themselves at the bottom of the sea the next morning.
—Jean de Joinville, c. 1305To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
—William Hazlitt, 1823Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.
—William James, 1902Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story.
—Suketu Mehta, 2019The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
—James Fenimore Cooper, 1838Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
—Henry George, 1879He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.
—E. R. Dodds, 1951There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
—Francis Bacon, 1625