Archive

Quotes

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

—P.D. James, 1992

Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.

—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC

Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.

—Dora Russell, 1983

In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.

—W.M.L. Jay, 1870

Envy and hatred are apt to blind the eyes and render them unable to behold things as they are.

—Margaret of Valois, c. 1600

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.

—James Baldwin, 1953

Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.

—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.

—Winston Churchill, 1945

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

—Samuel Johnson, 1759

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

—Tom Robbins, 1976

Men are what their mothers made them.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960