No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.
—W.H. Auden, 1962
Archive
Quotes
A bad reputation is easy to come by, painful to bear, and difficult to clear.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCThe 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, 1888The 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, 1870The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930Education—a debt due from present to future generations.
—George Peabody, 1852The law is not the same at morning and at night.
—George Herbert, c. 1633There 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, 2008Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
—Ulysses S. Grant, 1877Spring 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, 1962A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
—George Bernard Shaw, c. 1910