Archive

Quotes

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

The day unravels what the night has woven.

—Walter Benjamin, 1929

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

—Lewis Strauss, 1954

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

—William Hazlitt, 1821

Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.

—Oscar Wilde, 1895

Wherever commerce prevails there will be an inequality of wealth, and wherever the latter does a simplicity of manners must decline.

—James Madison, 1783

A private sin is not so prejudicial in this world as a public indecency.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

Health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.

—Helen Keller, 1936

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

—Hannah Arendt, 1958

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.

—Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1897