Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958
Archive
Quotes
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying.
—Barbara Ehrenreich, 2008The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
—Francis Bacon, 1625The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
—Salvador Dalí, 1953Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.
—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BCThe only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
—Winston Churchill, 1939Trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay.
—Oliver Goldsmith, 1770Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944The deed is everything, the glory naught.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832