Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745
Archive
Quotes
Some folks want their luck buttered.
—Thomas Hardy, 1886Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1940Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.
—Calvin Coolidge, 1932Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.
—Anthony Trollope, 1862Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.
—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?
—Stanisław Lem, 1961Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.
—Jack London, 1912A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000