Archive

Quotes

All our enemies are mortal.

—Paul Valéry, 1942

Fear has a smell, as love does.

—Margaret Atwood, 1972

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

I shall embrace my rival—until I suffocate him.

—Jean Racine, 1669

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

—Germaine Greer, 1970

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

—Aristophanes, 423 BC

Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, 1531

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?

—Philip Johnson, 1965

Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.

—Karl Kraus, 1909

If I see something sagging, dragging, or bagging, I’m going to go have the stuff tucked or plucked.

—Dolly Parton, 2003