A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.
—P.D. James, 1992
Archive
Quotes
Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BCIndustrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.
—Dora Russell, 1983In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.
—W.M.L. Jay, 1870Envy and hatred are apt to blind the eyes and render them unable to behold things as they are.
—Margaret of Valois, c. 1600People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
—James Baldwin, 1953Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.
—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
—Winston Churchill, 1945The true art of memory is the art of attention.
—Samuel Johnson, 1759Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
—Tom Robbins, 1976Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960