You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
—Billie Holiday, 1956
Archive
Quotes
It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515There is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
—Voltaire, 1764I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men and his aversion to lean ones.
—David Hume, 1751I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.
—John F. Kennedy, 1960Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.
—William Randolph Hearst, 1898Of my friends, I am the only one I have left.
—Terence, 161 BCArt transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
—Flannery O’Connor, 1964People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.
—Richard Nixon, 1975Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrities when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves.
—Sarah Bernhardt, 1904Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1937