Archive

Quotes

Credulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.

—Joseph Joubert, 1811

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

—George Orwell, 1944

I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.

—Phyllis Diller, 1981

A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.

—Amiri Baraka, 1962

Rivalry adds so much to the charms of one’s conquests.

—Louisa May Alcott, 1866

Without a decisive naval force, we can do nothing definitive, and with it, everything honorable and glorious.

—George Washington, 1781

In the Middle Ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

—Robert Runcie, 1988

It 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, 1958

I have a terrible memory; I never forget a thing.

—Edith Konecky, 1976

If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

—John Donne, 1623

When the abbot throws the dice, the whole convent will play.

—Martin Luther, c. 1540

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

—Jean Cocteau, 1947