Archive

Quotes

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

—George Moore, 1888

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

—Erasmus, 1518

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

—Charles Darwin, 1859

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832

Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.

—Blaise Pascal, 1669

Casting lots causes contentions to cease, and keeps the mighty apart.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know. 

—Albert Camus, 1942

Business? Why, it’s very simple; business is other people’s money.

—Alexandre Dumas, 1857

I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.

—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900

Avoid the law—the first loss is generally the least.

—Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, 1844

No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.

—Woodrow Wilson, 1915

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

—Thucydides, 410 BC