Cities are the abyss of the human species.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762
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Quotes
A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.
—Sumerian proverbWhereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921To live outside the law you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan, 1966The purest joy is to live without disguise, unconstrained by the ties of a grave reputation.
—Al-Hariri, c. 1108It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962The world began without man, and it will end without him.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.
—George Sand, 1851Traveling is like gambling: it is ever connected with winning and losing, and generally where least expected we receive more or less than we hoped for.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 43 BCWe call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877