“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers are to heroin-addicts.”
— Eric Hobsbawm (historian)
“A paranoid is someone who know’s a little of what’s going on. A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on.” — William S. Burroughs
“It probably started in poetry; almost everything does.”
— Raymond Chandler
“All words, even those misspoken, tell you something.”
— Wayne Mackeson
“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
— Joseph Campbell
“Everybody should come here. Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled, and yet at the same time, beautiful and awesome the world can be. Everyone should experience, even as the clouds gather, what’s at stake, what could be lost, what’s still here.”
— Anthony Bourdain
“There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden. The real world has more to do with what is hidden.”
— Saul Leiter (1923-2013)
“You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788)
“I’ve only ever been afraid of signs and symbols, never of people and things.”
— Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (1934)
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars … .”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I can see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
— […]
”The soul never thinks without a picture.”
— Aristotle, On the Soul (350 BC)
“The job of a criminal defense lawyer is to remind people of what they have chosen to misremember.”
“History puts a saint in every dream.”
— Tom Waits, Time (1985)
“of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glides; upon four-legged forest clouds, the cowboy angel rides … .”
— Bob Dylan, Gates of Eden (1965)
“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
— Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
“The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive; everybody’s out on the run tonight, but there’s no place left to hide.”
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (1974)
“Aloneness is a state of being whereas loneliness is a state of feeling. It’s like the difference between being broke and being poor.”
— Townes van Zandt
“Writers are always selling someone out.”
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)