For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
—Charles Baudelaire, c. 1865
Archive
Quotes
Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.
—Dorothy M. Richardson, 1923To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
—Georges Bataille, 1957All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933It is noble to die before doing anything that deserves death.
—Anaxandrides, c. 376Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCEvery city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
—John Berger, 1987By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCThe best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
—Michel Foucault, c. 1982There are people whom one loves immediately and forever. Even to know they are alive in the world with one is quite enough.
—Nancy Spain, 1956Family! Thou art the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
—August Strindberg, 1886Egypt was the mother of magicians.
—Clement of Alexandria, c. 200The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
—Basho, c. 1690