An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.
—Plato, c. 360 BC
Archive
Quotes
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1911Every man has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place.
—Samuel Johnson, 1771I have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
—Charles Lindbergh, 1948The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972I have often been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire.
—Thucydides, c. 404 BCThe world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BCEpitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Other nations use “force”; we Britons alone use “might.”
—Evelyn Waugh, 1938Drugs, cataplasms, and whiskey are stupid substitutes for the dignity and potency of divine mind and its efficacy to heal.
—Mary Baker Eddy, 1908The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.
—The Bible