Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness.
—Thomas Paine, 1792
Archive
Quotes
All technologies should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
—David Brower, 1992In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.
—Anthony Trollope, 1862If anything affects your eye, you hasten to have it removed; if anything affects your mind, you postpone the cure for a year.
—Horace, 20 BCKeep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.
—Coretta Scott King, 1994What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
—Voltaire, 1723I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.
—Nicharchus, c. 90It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended.
—Robert Frost, 1939