Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.
—Philip Stubbes, 1583
Archive
Quotes
Water is the first principle of everything.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BCIt is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.
—Plautus, c. 193 BCMedication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.
—Harriot K. Hunt, 1856When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
—Eugene V. Debs, 1918Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.
—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.
—Gertrude Stein, 1937“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
—Milan Kundera, 1990The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
—Jean Genet, 1949We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.
—Bill Gates, 1995Human happiness never remains long in the same place.
—Herodotus, c. 430 BCRivalry adds so much to the charms of one’s conquests.
—Louisa May Alcott, 1866