A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
—Ouida, 1880
Archive
Quotes
Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?
—Brooks Atkinson, 1940When law can do no right,
Let it be lawful that law bar no wrong.
Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Fire destroys that which feeds it.
—Simone Weil, c. 1940You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers.
—Walter Lippmann, 1913He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.
—James Joyce, 1922Infectious disease is one of the few genuine adventures left in the world.
—Hans Zinsser, 1935I can’t see (or feel) the conflict between love and religion. To me they’re the same thing.
—Elizabeth Bowen, c. 1970The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
—Erich Fromm, 1941If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide—because he kills not merely a man but a near relative—without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.
—Saint Augustine, c. 420The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.
—Hannah Arendt, 1972