Latest quotes
page 59

Dick Winters photo

“If you're a leader, you lead the way. Not just on the easy ones, you take the tough ones too.”

Dick Winters (1918–2011) American military personnel

Source: Band of Brothers, episode Crossroads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yggdVyan4XI

Neal Stephenson photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Larry Wall photo

“Beauty? What's that?”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199710221937.MAA25131@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Margaret Cho photo

“You will never make love, laugh, fight, eat, go to the movies, kiss, smile, dance, sing, run, skate, play the piano, buy candy for, argue jokingly, tell stories, look longingly at, jump on the bed with, pet the dogs with your faces, sing along with the song in the car and get the words wrong, share a secret, gossip, cop a feel, go hear a band that you both love, share a really good meal, carpool with people you don't like and make fun of them secretly later, cry, comfort, scratch backs, insist on pizza, catch them staring at you, put your arms around them, stay up too late, lean against warm bodies, feel safe with their feet sliding next to yours in bed, raise your children, go to boring dinner parties and get too drunk to drive home so you sleep in the car, spend alternate holidays with each others families, have uncontrollable lust with, followed by mind blowing fuck sessions lasting for hours and hours at a time, take a bath so hot one of you has to get out, all naked and wet and red and dizzy but not embarrassed because this is who you love and rarely are you shy with them, watch a TV show you both hate because the remote control is broken--merely happily, and maybe sometimes unhappily, share your life, and be with them, but you can't, because they're dead. Suddenly, unjustly, untimely, irretrievably--unconscionably dead.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, DEATH

Margaret Cho photo
Prevale photo

“Entrust your life to a person who can feel her heartbeat when you kiss her.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Affida la tua vita ad una persona che possa sentire il battito del suo cuore quando la baci.
Source: prevale.net

Joseph Campbell photo
Frank Lloyd Wright photo
Quintilian photo

“However many things we may have done, we are yet to a certain degree fresh for that which we are going to begin. Who, on the contrary, would not be stupified if he were to listen to the same teacher of any art, whatever it might be, through the whole day? But by change a person will be recruited, as is the case with respect to food, by varieties of which the stomach is re-invigorated and is fed with several sorts less unsatisfactorily than with one.”

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Quamlibet multa egerimus, quodam tamen modo recentes sumus ad id quod incipimus. quis non obtundi potest, si per totum diem cuiuscunque artis unum magistrum ferat? mutatione recreabitur sicut in cibis, quorum diversitate reficitur stomachus et pluribus minore fastidio alitur.
H. E. Butler's translation:
However manifold our activities, in a certain sense we come fresh to each new subject. Who can maintain his attention, if he has to listen for a whole day to one teacher harping on the same subject, be it what it may? Change of studies is like change of foods: the stomach is refreshed by their variety and derives greater nourishment from variety of viands.
Book I, Chapter XII, 5
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Quintilian photo

“Nature herself, indeed, seems to have given music to us as a benefit, to enable us to endure labors with greater facility, for musical sounds cheer even the rower; and it is not only in those works in which the efforts of many, while some pleasing voice leads them, conspire together that music is of avail, but the toil even of people at work by themselves finds itself soothed by song, however rude.”

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

H. E. Butler's translation:
Indeed nature itself seems to have given music as a boon to men to lighten the strain of labour: even the rower in the galleys is cheered to effort by song. Nor is this function of music confined to cases where the efforts of a number are given union by the sound of some sweet voice that sets the tune, but even solitary workers find solace at their toil in artless song.
Book I, Chapter X, 16
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)
Original: (la) Atque eam natura ipsa videtur ad tolerandos facilius labores velut muneri nobis dedisse, si quidem et remigem cantus hortatur; nec solum in iis operibus in quibus plurium conatus praeeunte aliqua iucunda voce conspirat, sed etiam singulorum fatigatio quamlibet se rudi modulatione solatur.

Brennus photo

“Down with the defeated!”

Brennus Gaulish chieftain

Vae Victis!
See Livy v. 33-49; Plutarch, Camillus, 17, 22, 28; Polybius i. 6, ii. 18; Dion. Halic. xiii. 7
Variant translation: Down with the defeated!
His statement to the conquered Romans following the capture of Rome (circa 390 BC), as quoted in Livy Ab urbe condita, bk. 5, ch. 48, section 9 (reference taken from 1997's Chambers Dictionary of Quotations, p. 187).

Richard Feynman photo
Will Cuppy photo

“The Modern Man or Nervous Wreck is the highest of all mammals because anyone can see that he is. There are about 2,000,000,000 Modern Men, or too many. The Modern Man's highly developed brain has made him what he is and you know what he is.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: It is because of his brain that he has risen above the animals. Guess which animals he has risen above.
The Modern Man
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Julian of Norwich photo
Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert photo
Frank Herbert photo
Jonas Salk photo
André Breton photo

“Divine Dali!”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of Breton, written in the prologue of The Diary of a Genius, Salvador Dali, London Pan Books, 1976, 1980 p. 35
after 1930