Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
—Tom Robbins, 1976
Archive
Quotes
Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1836My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
—André Malraux, 1951The history of the land has been written very largely in water.
—John Hodgdon Bradley Jr., 1935In settling an island, the first building erected by a Spaniard will be a church, by a Frenchman a fort, by a Dutchman a warehouse, and by an Englishman an alehouse.
—Francis Grose, 1787We all have a contract with the public—in us they see themselves, or what they would like to be.
—Clark Gable, 1935Not all heads have a brain.
—French proverb“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCVery shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.
—Andy Warhol, 1975A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.
—Saul Bellow, 1989