Democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.
—Margaret Halsey, 1946
Archive
Quotes
Drunkenness is the very sepulcher / Of man’s wit and his discretion.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1390You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
—Billie Holiday, 1956I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!
—George H. W. Bush, 1990Memory is the only
afterlife I can understand.
Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
—Plato, c. 378 BCI have learned much from disease which life could never have taught me anywhere else.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1830He who sings frightens away his ills.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.
—Ernst Jünger, 1977There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.
—Annie Proulx, 2008It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.
—Anaxandrides, c. 376Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
—Mao Zedong, 1938Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1630