“Work” does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1964
Archive
Quotes
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
—Noël Coward, 1930The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
—Michel Foucault, c. 1982Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
—James Baldwin, 1961In all the ancient states and empires, those who had the shipping, had the wealth.
—William Petty, 1690How sweet it is to have people point and say, “There he is.”
—Persius, c. 60Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.
—Saint Augustine, c. 387Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
—George Orwell, 1944I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.
—Coretta Scott King, 1994Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCTomorrow never comes, man. It’s all the same fucking day.
—Janis Joplin, 1972The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860