Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.
—Theodore Roszak, 1972Quotes
This is Year Zero.
—Pol Pot, 1975A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that remains of it.
—Susan Sontag, 1977The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971There is no profit without another’s loss.
—Roman proverbGive me chastity and continence, but not just now.
—Saint Augustine, 397He laughs best who laughs last.
—French proverbLabor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCThe ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972War is the child of pride, and pride the daughter of riches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1697Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
—Lucretius, c. 58 BCIn the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
—Colette, 1944We wish away whole years, and travel through time as through a country filled with many wild and empty wastes, which we would fain hurry over, that we may arrive at those several little settlements or imaginary points of rest which are dispersed up and down in it.
—Joseph Addison, 1711