The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921
Archive
Quotes
Understanding is a very dull occupation.
—Gertrude Stein, 1937I mean, why on earth (outside sickness and hangovers) aren’t people continually drunk? I want ecstasy of the mind all the time.
—Jack Kerouac, 1957Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
—Samuel Johnson, 1751A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.
—Anaxandrides, c. 376The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
—Chinua Achebe, 1958The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
—H.L. Mencken, 1919There is nothing sillier than a silly laugh.
—Catullus, c. 60 BCIt costs a lot of money to be rich.
—Peter Boyle, 2002What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.
—Erasmus, 1515