Archive

Quotes

I doubt that we have any right to pity the dead for their own sakes.

—Lord Byron, 1817

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

—George Eliot, c. 1872

Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

Knowledge itself is power.

—Francis Bacon, 1597

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

—Anthony Trollope, 1862

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.

—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913

The less intelligent the white man is, the more stupid he thinks the black.

—André Gide, 1927

If the people be the governors, who shall be governed?

—John Cotton, c. 1636

Colonialism has meant selling our ore and being left with the holes.

—Samora Moisés Machel, c. 1976

He that raises a large family, does indeed, while he lives to observe them, stand…a broader mark for sorrow; but then he stands a broader mark for pleasure too. 

—Benjamin Franklin, 1786

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”

—Michel Serres, 1982