Archive

Quotes

Hunting is all that’s worth living for—all time is lost what is not spent in hunting—it is like the air we breathe—if we have it not we die—it’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt.

—Robert Smith Surtees, 1843

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.

—George Orwell, 1945

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865

Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

—Gertrude Stein, 1914

’Tis a portentous sign / When a man sweats and at the same time shivers.

—Plautus, c. 180 BC

Spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.

—Rachel Carson, 1962

The friend of all humanity is no friend to me.

—Molière, 1666

The future comes like an unwelcome guest.

—Edmund Gosse, 1873

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the state.

—Albert Camus, 1951

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

—Aldous Huxley, 1926

The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.

—George Moore, 1888

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

—Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976