No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.
—Emma Goldman, 1917
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Quotes
Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.
—James Joyce, 1922“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.
—Phyllis Diller, 1981Communities do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1863There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821The period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.
—George Washington, 1786Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
—W.H. Auden, c. 1940He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.
—Muhammad, c. 630How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do.
—William James, 1902The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
—Salvador Dalí, 1953