Whenever in history equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.
—Mary McCarthy, 1971
Archive
Quotes
Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
—Anacharsis, c. 550 BCIt would seem that in history it’s never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.
—Sybille Bedford, 1963When arms speak, the laws are silent.
—Cicero, 52 BCA lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.
—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H.L. Mencken, 1920Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1918The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.
—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008Man is merely a more perfect animal than the rest. He reasons better.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
—Willa Cather, 1918The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.
—Judge Learned Hand, 1944We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.
—Samuel Pepys, 1661