What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
—Henry Adams, 1907
Archive
Quotes
All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.
—Fran Lebowitz, 1978Only the little people pay taxes.
—Leona Helmsley, 1989Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg, 1936If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1513The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are without clothes.
—Pliny the Elder, 77Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BCI cannot bear a parent’s tears.
—Virgil, c. 25 BCIf you are truly serious about preparing your child for the future, don’t teach him to subtract—teach him to deduct.
—Fran Lebowitz, 1981In the society of men, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
—R.D. Laing, 1967A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.
—William Blake, 1807I’ve seen the future, brother; it is murder.
—Leonard Cohen, 1992Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946