Men argue, nature acts.
—Voltaire, 1764Quotes
Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
—Albert Einstein, 1929Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
—Mark Twain, 1893Very shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.
—Andy Warhol, 1975Commerce has made all winds her ministers.
—John Sterling, 1843All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
—Edward Gibbon, 1788That sweet bondage which is freedom’s self.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1813Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
—Gertrude Stein, 1940The 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, 1964All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
—John Ruskin, 1856Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.
—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878