It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966
Archive
Quotes
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Envy is the basis of democracy.
—Bertrand Russell, 1930Petty laws breed great crimes.
—Ouida, 1880Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
—Michel Foucault, c. 1982Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.
—Cicero, c. 45 BCThe true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, c. 1952The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922Before the earth could become an industrial garbage can, it had first to become a research laboratory.
—Theodore Roszak, 1972Spit not in the well; you may have to drink its water.
—French proverb