When I do a show, the whole show revolves around me, and if I don’t show up, they can just forget it.
—Ethel Merman, c. 1955
Archive
Quotes
I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
—Marilyn Monroe, 1962It 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, 1958Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
—William Blake, c. 1790The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956Even though counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.
—Learned Hand, 1932Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live.
—Anatole Broyard, 1989Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905I look for the end of the future, but it never ceases to arrive.
—Zhuangzi, c. 325 BCToil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849The first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.
—Umberto Eco, 1980Men are what their mothers made them.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860The march of the human mind is slow.
—Edmund Burke, 1775