Archive

Quotes

We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

—D.H. Lawrence, 1928

Nature’s rules have no exceptions.

—Herbert Spencer, 1851

Can we not live without pleasure, who cannot but with pleasure die?

—Tertullian, c. 215

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

—Gore Vidal, 1973

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are without clothes.

—Pliny the Elder, 77

A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

—Tacitus, c. 100

There’s plenty of fire in the coldest flint!

—Rachel Field, 1939

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Charity is murder and you know it.

—Dorothy Parker, 1956

No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water drinkers.

—Horace, 35 BC

My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.

—John Quincy Adams, 1844

Jests and scoffs do lessen majesty and greatness and should be far from great personages and men of wisdom.

—Henry Peacham, 1622