You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
—Walter Lippmann, 1913
Archive
Quotes
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
—George Eliot, 1872Casting lots causes contentions to cease, and keeps the mighty apart.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCPolitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925Whoever has died is freed from sin.
—St. Paul, c. 50If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.
—George W. Bush, 2005The future...something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
—C.S. Lewis, 1941The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
—Paul Valéry, 1931Style is the image of character.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1789It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?
—Stanisław Lem, 1961In all the ancient states and empires, those who had the shipping, had the wealth.
—William Petty, 1690