A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832
Archive
Quotes
Rebellion is no less a sin than divination.
—Book of Samuel, c. 550 BCMost new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, c. 1940While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
—Andrea Dworkin, 1983How gloriously legible are the constellations of the heavens!
—Anthony Trollope, 1859The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant, democracy to many.
—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.
—Agnes Repplier, 1929Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
—Epictetus, c. 100