Man’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, 1962
Archive
Quotes
Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1838A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
—Charles Baudelaire, 1852As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
—Havelock Ellis, 1914They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.
—Virgil, c. 30 BCPetty laws breed great crimes.
—Ouida, 1880Let us make our own mistakes, but let us take comfort in the knowledge that they are our own mistakes.
—Tom Mboya, 1958Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.
—Lorraine Hansberry, 1965The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
—Bertrand Russell, 1938We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891