Archive

Quotes

My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.

—Tecumseh, 1810

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

—Philip Stubbes, 1583

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.

—Horace, 20 BC

This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a clash about civilization.

—Tony Blair, 2006

If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

—Margaret Atwood, 2005

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.

—George Eliot, 1860

The highest result of education is tolerance.

—Helen Keller, 1903

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

—John Updike, 1963

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

—Wallace Stevens, 1952

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for a while their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

—Maya Angelou, 2011