Archive

Quotes

Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

There 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, 1714

Some 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, 2008

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.

—Salvador Dalí, 1953

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BC

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

—Bernard De Voto, 1951

Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.

—Winston Churchill, 1939

Trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay.

—Oliver Goldsmith, 1770

Everyone 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, 1944

The deed is everything, the glory naught.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832