Archive

Quotes

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.

—W.H. Auden, 1962

A bad reputation is easy to come by, painful to bear, and difficult to clear.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

—George Moore, 1888

The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870

The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.

—Nadine Gordimer, 1971

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

Education—a debt due from present to future generations.

—George Peabody, 1852

The law is not the same at morning and at night.

—George Herbert, c. 1633

There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.

—Annie Proulx, 2008

Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.

—Ulysses S. Grant, 1877

Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.

—Rachel Carson, 1962

A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

If parents would only realize how they bore their children!

—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910