Archive

Quotes

If both what is before and what is after are in this same “now,” things which happened ten thousand years ago would be simultaneous with what has happened today, and nothing would be before or after anything else.

—Aristotle, c. 330 BC

Music is our myth of the inner life.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1942

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

—Edith Wharton, 1924

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

—Max Born, 1968

’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.

—Cotton Mather, 1693

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

—Aleksandr Pushkin, 1837

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

—Edward O. Wilson, 2009

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

—H.G. Wells, 1920

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

—John Ruskin, 1856

There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the mental tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1665

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946