Water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element.
—Christopher Hitchens, 2008
Archive
Quotes
One thing alone not even God can do: to make undone whatever has been done.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCSpring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong.
—Rachel Carson, 1962Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.
—Simone Weil, 1934Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.
—Karl Kraus, 1909God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
—Arthur Koestler, 1967Such then is the human state, that to wish greatness for one’s country is to wish harm to one’s neighbors.
—Voltaire, 1764The true art of memory is the art of attention.
—Samuel Johnson, 1759Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906I have always found it in mine own experience an easier matter to devise many and profitable inventions than to dispose of one of them to the good of the author himself.
—Hugh Plat, 1595Man’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962Avoid the talk of men. For talk is mischievous, light, and easily raised, but hard to bear and difficult to be rid of. Talk never wholly dies away when many people voice her: even talk is in some ways divine.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCThe traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125