Archive

Quotes

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

Nobody, sir, dies willingly.

—Antiphanes, c. 370 BC

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. War is hell.

—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1879

Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.

—Larry Kramer, 1992

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

—Albert Einstein, 1936

Yes to a market economy, no to a market society.

—Lionel Jospin, 1998

There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

—David Foster Wallace, 2000

A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.

—Jane Austen, 1816

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906