Archive

Quotes

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.

—John Paul Jones, 1778

Plough deep while sluggards sleep.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1758

The true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, c. 1952

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

—Elias Canetti, 1960

Punishment is a sort of medicine.

—Aristotle, c. 340 BC

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1862

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.

—George Orwell, 1945

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1967

As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

—Havelock Ellis, 1914

Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390

With the dead there is no rivalry.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1839