I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.
—Groucho Marx, 1959
Archive
Quotes
More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
—Amiri Baraka, 1962Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390The 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, 1888Let us make our own mistakes, but let us take comfort in the knowledge that they are our own mistakes.
—Tom Mboya, 1958If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.
—Congolese proverbA school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Wood burns because it has the proper stuff in it, and a man becomes famous because he has the proper stuff in him.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, c. 1790The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
—Théophile Gautier, c. 1835To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.
—Milan Kundera, 1978Children are all foreigners. We treat them as such.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1839Your mind’s got to eat, too.
—Dambudzo Marechera, 1978