It is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.
—Plautus, c. 193 BC
Archive
Quotes
Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own one.
—A.J. Liebling, 1960Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Hazel Rochman, 1995Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
—Jane Austen, 1814All that we know is nothing can be known.
—Lord Byron, 1812I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.
—Clarence Darrow, 1932The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.
—John Steinbeck, 1941Health can make money, but money cannot make health.
—Maria Edgeworth, 1833One man’s loss is another man’s profit.
—Michel de Montaigne, c. 1580Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.
—John Camden Hotten, 1859The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
—Gustave Flaubert, 1871Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver, 1990