It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.
—Francis Bacon, 1625
Archive
Quotes
Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?
—Victoria Wolff, 1943The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.
—Myrtle Reed, 1910Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer.
—William Cecil, Lord Burghley, c. 1555To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
—Christina Stead, 1938We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.
—Cyril Connolly, 1944Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCIt’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man, not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
—Jean Genet, 1983Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
—John Berger, 1987One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1911