I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
—Ray Bradbury, 1992
Archive
Quotes
The world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955Anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being that is being, listening, and hearing is never repetition.
—Gertrude Stein, 1935The worship of opinion is, at this day, the established religion of the United States.
—Harriet Martineau, 1839Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.
—Germaine Greer, 1970Keep 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, 1964The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chawing a hunk of melon in the dust.
—Elizabeth Bowen, 1955Nature is immovable.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCEven a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger, 1977The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCHe who travels by sea is nothing but a worm on a piece of wood, a trifle in the midst of a powerful creation. The waters play about with him at will, and no one but God can help him.
—Muhammad as-Saffar, 1846What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830The purest joy is to live without disguise, unconstrained by the ties of a grave reputation.
—Al-Hariri, c. 1108