We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.
—Ida M. Tarbell, 1904
Archive
Quotes
When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.
—Ethel Merman, c. 1955As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.
—Genesis, c. 900 BCOne cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—Virginia Woolf, 1929Nature contains no one constant form.
—Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach, 1770A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.
—Pliny the Younger, c. 109The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their elders and copying one another.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968Money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964Medication 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, 1856Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906We and the dead ride quick at night.
—Gottfried August Bürger, 1773Anyone who in discussion quotes authority uses his memory rather than his intellect.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500