Slang 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, 1859
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Quotes
The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125Memory is like the moon, which hath its new, its full, and its wane.
—Margaret Cavendish, 1655What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170Whoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50A great step toward independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 60When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
—Winston Churchill, 1945Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
—Francis Bacon, 1625By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCRevolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives.
—Italo Calvino, 1957What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728The dead are often just as living to us as the living are, only we cannot get them to believe it. They can come to us, but till we die we cannot go to them. To be dead is to be unable to understand that one is alive.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1888