Archive

Quotes

Music sweeps by me as a messenger / Carrying a message that is not for me.

—George Eliot, 1868

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.

—Chinese proverb

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

—Claude Monet, 1908

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent.

—Louis Brandeis, 1928

When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

—Desmond Tutu, 1984

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1967

A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.

—Ethiopian proverb

You must not grow used to making money out of everything. One sees more people ruined than one has seen preserved by shameful gains.

—Sophocles, c. 442 BC

Man has here two and a half minutes—one to smile, one to sigh, and half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.

—Jean Paul, 1795

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

—B.F. Skinner, 1969

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

—Donald Barthelme, 1964

We don’t have the option of turning away from the future. No one gets to vote on whether technology is going to change our lives.

—Bill Gates, 1995