What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.
—Erasmus, 1515
Archive
Quotes
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851No wise man ever wished to be younger.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.
—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness.
—Joseph Addison, 1712I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.
—Coretta Scott King, 1994I am sure of this: that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would not be half the disorders in the world there are now.
—Jane Austen, c. 1798The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
—James Fenimore Cooper, 1838Moderation in all things.
—Terence, 166 BCReason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
—George Washington, 1796A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.
—Karl Kraus, 1909