Archive

Quotes

Do you suppose it possible to know democracy without knowing the people?

—Xenophon, c. 370 BC

The Mediterranean has the colors of a mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet—you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has taken on a tinge of pink or gray.

—Vincent van Gogh, 1888

’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.

—Cotton Mather, 1693

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

—Flannery O’Connor, 1964

Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.

—Juvenal, c. 121

There is nothing sillier than a silly laugh.

—Catullus, c. 60 BC

I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792

Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1862

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

—W.H. Auden, 1947

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.

—Chinese proverb

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1902

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

—Henry Kissinger, 1977