Archive

Quotes

Whenever in history equality appeared on the agenda, it was exported somewhere else, like an undesirable.

—Mary McCarthy, 1971

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 BC

It would seem that in history it’s never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.

—Sybille Bedford, 1963

When arms speak, the laws are silent.

—Cicero, 52 BC

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.

—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010

There 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, 1920

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1918

The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.

—Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2008

Man is merely a more perfect animal than the rest. He reasons better.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

—Willa Cather, 1918

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.

—Samuel Pepys, 1661