Water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element.
—Christopher Hitchens, 2008
Archive
Quotes
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
—James Fenimore Cooper, 1838France has neither winter, summer, nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
—Mark Twain, 1879Luck is believing you’re lucky.
—William Carlos Williams, 1947What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
—Robert Burton, 1621I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.
—Thomas Malory, c. 1470I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1855Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390The 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, 1972Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H.G. Wells, 1920The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
—Donald Barthelme, 1964Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.
—Philip Sidney, 1582The only function of a school is to make self-education easier.
—Isaac Asimov, 1974