I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?
—Andy Warhol, 1963
Archive
Quotes
The art of invention grows young with the things invented.
—Francis Bacon, 1605There is no work of human hands which time does not wear away and reduce to dust.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 46 BCNothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843A friend in power is a friend lost.
—Henry Adams, 1905Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCGovernments are not overthrown by the poor, who have no power, but by the rich—when they are insulted by their inferiors and cannot obtain justice.
—Dionysius of Halicarnassus, c. 20 BCWe must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.
—John Winthrop, 1630The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.
—Lester Bangs, 1971The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.
—Hans Christian Andersen, 1837