Archive

Quotes

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back whence we came.

—John F. Kennedy, 1962

Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.

—August Strindberg, 1886

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

—Magna Carta, 1215

How like to us is that filthy beast the ape.

—Cicero, 45 BC

Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851

I am a friend of the workingman, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

—Clarence Darrow, 1932

What mighty contests rise from trivial things.

—Alexander Pope, 1712

To call a fashion wearable is the kiss of death. No new fashion worth its salt is ever wearable.

—Eugenia Sheppard, 1960

That sweet bondage which is freedom’s self.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1813

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

—Ovid, c. 10

Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

Man is a troublesome animal and therefore is not very manageable.

—Plato, c. 349 BC

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper that did his job well.

—Martin Luther King Jr., 1954