Archive

Quotes

Honest commerce is the great civilizer. We exchange ideas when we exchange fabrics.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1882

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.

—Louis Brandeis, 1928

The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

—Nell Scovell, 1991

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy.

—George Eliot, 1844

One’s body, hair, and skin are a gift from one’s parents—do not dare to allow them to be harmed.

—Classic of Filial Piety, c. 200 BC

Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.

—Karl Kraus, 1912

To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.

—Plutarch, c. 100

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

—Oscar Wilde, 1887

Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay here and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”

—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough.

—R.D. Laing, 1967

Wit enables us to act rudely with impunity.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.

—Francis Bacon, 1620