Archive

Quotes

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

—Orson Welles, 1953

Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.

—Voltaire, 1764

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst thing you could say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever. After all, you know, there are worse things in life than death.

—Woody Allen, 1975

Who draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.

—James Howell, 1659

In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.

—W.M.L. Jay, 1870

Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.

—William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.

—Arthur Koestler, 1967

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

Suffering has its limit, but fears are endless.

—Pliny the Younger, c. 108

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

—Confucius, c. 500 BC

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851

The only equals are those who are equally rich.

—Burundian proverb