If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930
Archive
Quotes
’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595If not us, who? If not now, when?
—Czech slogan, 1989Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
—Will Self, 1994After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams.
—E.M. Cioran, 1949Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D.H. Lawrence, 1908Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a centaur, a leopard, a wolf, or a bull?
—Aristophanes, 423 BCA difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
—George Eliot, 1876People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005Those who trust to chance must abide by the results of chance.
—Calvin Coolidge, 1932The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.
—Horace, c. 25 BCDespotism subjects a nation to one tyrant, democracy to many.
—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839