Archive

Quotes

Those who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.

—Heraclitus, c. 500 BC

The only evidence, so far as I know, about another life is, first, that we have no evidence; and, secondly, that we are rather sorry that we have not, and wish we had.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, 1879

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?

—Victoria Wolff, 1943

Happiness is a warm puppy.

—Charles Schulz, 1971

Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide, wide sea!

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?

—Brooks Atkinson, 1940

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1908

If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.

—Michael Harrington, 1962

Most vegetarians I ever saw looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.

—Finley Peter Dunne, 1900

It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.

—Francis Bacon, 1620

A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832