The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963
Archive
Quotes
Egypt was the mother of magicians.
—Clement of Alexandria, c. 200How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.
—George Herbert, 1651I live by good soup, and not on fine language.
—Molière, 1672The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.
—Tacitus, c. 117He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCSometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
—Carl Sandburg, 1936To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
—William Hazlitt, 1823I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
—Gore Vidal, 1973It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985And to our age’s drowsy blood / Still shouts the inspiring sea.
—James Russell Lowell, 1848