The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
—Edward Gibbon, 1788
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Quotes
He who commands the sea has command of everything.
—Francis Bacon, c. 1600Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?
—Stanisław Lem, 1961Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.
—Gerald Priestland, 1988A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
—Henry Adams, 1907The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870If 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., 1954Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.
—John Camden Hotten, 1859Alcohol is the monarch of liquids.
—Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1825Better free in a strange land than a slave at home.
—German proverbA fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
—Ethiopian proverbLet the people think they govern, and they will be governed.
—William Penn, 1693