I have given up considering happiness as relevant.
—Edward Gorey, 1974
Archive
Quotes
How sad a sight is human happiness to those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour!
—Edward Young, 1741We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.
—Anna Sewell, 1877A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
—Martin Luther King Jr., c. 1967If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley, 1926Labor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCSuperstitions are habits rather than beliefs.
—Marlene Dietrich, 1962When the abbot throws the dice, the whole convent will play.
—Martin Luther, c. 1540A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!
—Philip Roth, 1969I have always been of the mind that in a democracy, manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie knife.
—James Russell Lowell, 1873Men, my dear, are very queer animals—a mixture of horse nervousness, ass stubbornness, and camel malice.
—T. H. Huxley, 1895These useless men ought to be cut up and served at a banquet. I really believe that athletes have less intelligence than swine.
—Dio Chrysostom, c. 95No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water drinkers.
—Horace, 35 BC