I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.
—Herman Melville, 1853
Archive
Quotes
What one man can invent another can discover.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCWar to the castles; peace to the cottages.
—Nicolas Chamfort, 1790Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BCA friend in power is a friend lost.
—Henry Adams, 1905O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1599The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972There never was a good war or a bad peace.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1773Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?
—Philip Johnson, 1965I’ve got some shit I’m conservative about and some shit I’m liberal about. Crime—I’m conservative. Prostitution—I’m liberal.
—Chris Rock, 2008The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.
—John Nance Garner, c. 1967All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
—David Brower, 1992