Every 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, 1987
Archive
Quotes
The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later.
—George Moore, 1888Labor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCIt is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.
—Albert Einstein, 1930If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.
—Francis Bacon, 1615Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.
—Gerald Priestland, 1988By night an atheist half believes a God.
—Edward Young, c. 1745Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
—Saint Augustine, c. 400On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.
—Edward Bellamy, 1888No one’s serious at seventeen.
—Arthur Rimbaud, 1870More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.
—Gertrude Stein, 1943I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.
—Al Capone, 1929