It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
—Frederick Douglass, 1852
Archive
Quotes
Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895The future, like everything else, is no longer quite what it used to be.
—Paul Valéry, 1931If anything affects your eye, you hasten to have it removed; if anything affects your mind, you postpone the cure for a year.
—Horace, 20 BCWhat man was ever content with one crime?
—Juvenal, c. 125Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Once a woman has lost her chastity she will shrink from nothing.
—Tacitus, c. 100Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905There is a sickness among tyrants: they cannot trust their friends.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCThe brightest light burns the quickest.
—Olive Beatrice Muir, 1900The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.
—André Gide, 1927