The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840
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Quotes
Friend! It is a common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful things, it may be tarnished by careless handling.
—Harriet Jacobs, 1861Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.
—Matsuo Basho, c. 1685Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France, 1881Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
—James Baldwin, 1953Good men must not obey the laws too well.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844A machine is a slave that neither brings nor bears degradation.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.
—Ira Berkow, 1987It would be madness, and inconsistency, to suppose that things which have never yet been performed can be performed without employing some hitherto untried means.
—Francis Bacon, 1620