What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BC
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Quotes
It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.
—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake.
—Ovid, 10He who is afraid of his own memories is cowardly, really cowardly.
—Elias Canetti, 1954Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.
—Karl Kraus, 1912We die of comfort and by conflict live.
—May Sarton, 1953Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCA private sin is not so prejudicial in this world as a public indecency.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
—Desmond Tutu, 1984Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987