Archive

Quotes

I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

—Philip Stubbes, 1583

Only the little people pay taxes.

—Leona Helmsley, 1989

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

In the past, men created witches; now they create mental patients.

—Thomas Szasz, 1970

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself. 

—Saint Augustine, c. 420

Very shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.

—Andy Warhol, 1975

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours, a fixed salary, and very little original thinking to do.

—Roald Dahl, 1984

If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.

—Charles Dickens, 1865

Seafarers 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. 1305

Put national causes first and personal grudges last.

—Sima Qian, c. 91 BC

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry, 1943