Archive

Quotes

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

—George Orwell, 1944

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

—Bertrand Russell, 1930

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

—Gertrude Stein, 1943

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

—Immanuel Kant, 1784

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1886

I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1789

The gods play games with men as balls.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

—Virginia Woolf, 1929

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

As man disappears from sight, the land remains.

—Maori proverb

If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1843

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1790