Oh, democracy! Whither are you leading us?
—Aristophanes, 414 BC
Archive
Quotes
Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of Man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961Secrets define us, they mark us, they set us apart from all the others. The secrets which we preserve provide a key to who we are, deep down.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1998Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant—democracy to many.
—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830It is not right for a ruler who has the nation in his charge, a man with so much on his mind, to sleep all night.
—Homer, c. 750 BCMany are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.
—Sophocles, c. 441 BCOne of the things men should most strive to do is win a good reputation and see that no one questions it.
—Juan Manuel, 1335There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H.L. Mencken, 1920The 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, 1987There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714