In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.
—Gertrude Stein, 1937
Archive
Quotes
A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787I live by good soup, and not on fine language.
—Molière, 1672Don’t hit a man at all if you can avoid it, but if you have to hit him, knock him out.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1916I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
—Albert Camus, 1957Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
—B.F. Skinner, 1964I’ve seen the future, brother; it is murder.
—Leonard Cohen, 1992Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665I drink for the thirst to come.
—François Rabelais, 1535I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.
—Phyllis Diller, 1981The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward VIII, 1957What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971