Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
—Albert Einstein, 1929
Archive
Quotes
Some folks want their luck buttered.
—Thomas Hardy, 1886No man will take counsel, but every man will take money: therefore money is better than counsel.
—Jonathan Swift, 1702Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.
—Herman Melville, 1849The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation.
—Oliver Sacks, 2012What reason weaves, by passion is undone.
—Alexander Pope, 1972To live outside the law you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan, 1966Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.
—Robert P. Hudson, 1983All men recognize the right of revolution, that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1849