Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.
—Tertullian, c. 217
Archive
Quotes
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.
—Maxim Gorky, 1902Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1838I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
—Albert Camus, 1957To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
—Jean Genet, 1949A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.
—Saul Bellow, 1989This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
—Susan Sontag, 1977The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
—Edward, Duke of Windsor, 1957Time will reveal everything. It is a babbler and speaks even when not asked.
—Euripides, c. 425 BCThe boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.
—Plato, c. 348 BC