Archive

Quotes

Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

—T.S. Eliot, 1911

The workers are the saviors of society, the redeemers of the race.

—Eugene V. Debs, 1905

I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!

—Willa Cather, 1915

Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.

—Sarah Bernhardt, 1904

If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.

—Congolese proverb

The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.

—Myrtle Reed, 1910

Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant, democracy to many.

—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839

No law is sufficiently convenient to all.

—Roman proverb

A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers; and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.

—Josiah Tucker, 1766

A dissolute and intemperate youth hands down the body to old age in a worn-out state.

—Cicero, 44 BC

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

—Federico Fellini, c. 1950

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

—Frederick Douglass, 1852