It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790
Archive
Quotes
Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1918Hygienic law, like martial law, supersedes rights in crises.
—Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1913The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.
—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010War is fear cloaked in courage.
—William Westmoreland, 1966Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
—Ethiopian proverbI work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917I have always been of the mind that in a democracy, manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie knife.
—James Russell Lowell, 1873We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.
—Leonard Cohen, 1970