Archive

Quotes

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1923

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.

—Gustave Flaubert, 1845

Give us this day our television, and an automobile, but deliver us from freedom.

—Jean-Luc Godard, 1966

Love lasteth as long as the money endureth.

—William Caxton, 1476

To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous. 

—Pierre Boulez, 1989

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

—John Locke, 1695

Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.

—Cicero, c. 45 BC

It’s the educated barbarian who is the worst: he knows what to destroy.

—Helen MacInnes, 1963

Happiness (as the mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by asymptote.

—Christopher Morley, 1919

What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?

—Ovid, c. 10

In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.

—W.M.L. Jay, 1870

Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.

—William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847