According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1794
Archive
Quotes
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
—Henry Clay, 1842What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?
—Mary Renault, 1956Drinking with women is as unnatural as scolding with ’em.
—William Wycherley, 1675All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
—Havelock Ellis, 1921And what will history say of me a thousand years hence?
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 59 BCYour body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade, 1797He makes his cook his merit, and the world visits his dinners and not him.
—Molière, 1666Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905Scandal begins where the police leave off.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal, 1973In every man is a wild beast; most of them don’t know how to hold it back, and the majority give it full rein when they are not restrained by terror of law.
—Frederick the Great, 1759