Random quote

There were no books in Eden, and there will be none in heaven.

Augustine Birrell


Category: History and Nations

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1. "In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce."

Francesco Caracciolo

Other categories: God and Religion


2. "A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards."

Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths"


3. "An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination."

George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"

Other categories: Reality and Imagination


4. "There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings."

Sarah M. Grimke, "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes"

Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Woman and Man


5. "Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy."

Benjamin Disraeli

Other categories: Human


6. "Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor."

Arnold Toynbee

Other categories: Various


7. "America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair."

Arnold Toynbee

Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy


8. "History, a distillation of rumour."

Thomas Carlyle, "History of the French Revolution"


9. "Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great."

Clement Attlee

Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy


10. "And what should they know of England who only England know?"

Rudyard Kipling, "The English Flag"


11. "The British tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters."

Robert Morley


12. "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

Edward Gibbon

Other categories: Human


13. "Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old."

Rudyard Kipling, "Life's Handicap"


14. "Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most."

Norman Mailer, "Barbary Shore"


15. "A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs."

German proverb

Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity


16. "Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe."

Angela Carter

Other categories: Sorrow and Nostalgia


17. "I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version."

Don Delillo, "The Names"


18. "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts--the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art."

John Ruskin, "St. Mark's Rest"

Other categories: Art and Culture


19. "France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams."

Thomas Carlyle, "History of the French Revolution"

Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Wit and Humor


20. "Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."

Robert Orben

Other categories: Various


21. "Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact."

Marlene Dietrich, "Marlene Dietrich's ABC"

Other categories: Manners and Ethics


22. "I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together."

Charles Dickens

Other categories: Manners and Ethics


23. "Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

George Orwell, "The Lion and the Unicorn"

Other categories: Peace and War


24. "A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else."

George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"

Other categories: Freedom and Servitude


25. "Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do."

George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"

Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Freedom and Servitude


26. "Every time history repeats itself the price goes up."

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27. "In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting."

Stefan Zweig, "Stellar Moments in Human History"

Other categories: Intellect, Judgement


28. "American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe."

Harold Rosenberg, "The Tradition of the New"

Other categories: Time and Passing


29. "Everything ends this way in France. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, affairs of state - everything is a pretext for a good dinner."

Jean Anouilh, "Cécile"

Other categories: Health and Alcohol


30. "Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."

James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name"

Other categories: Various


31. "Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid program for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer."

Stanley Rudin

Other categories: Normality and Madness


32. "Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart."

Yasir Arafat

Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy


33. "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it."

Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics"


34. "The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen."

Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics"

Other categories: Art and Culture


35. "Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held."

Aldous Huxley, "Beyond the Mexique Bay"

Other categories: Authority, Government


36. "Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum."

P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"

Other categories: Authority, Government


37. "America is a young country with an old mentality."

George Santayana, "Winds of Doctrine"


38. "When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London."

Bette Midler


39. "France may claim the happiest marriages in the world, but the happiest divorces in the world are "made in America.""

Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"

Other categories: Manners and Ethics -:- Marriage


40. "History is the short trudge from Adam to atom."

Leonard Louis Levinson


41. "America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there."

Laurence J. Peter


42. "Some people make headlines while others make history."

Philip Elmer-DeWitt


43. "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

Gore Vidal

Other categories: Patriotism


44. "A mere fact will never stop an Englishman."

George Bernard Shaw

Other categories: Various


45. "History is statistics in a state of progression; statistics is history at a stand."

Ludwig Schlozer

Other categories: Science and Technology


46. "An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."

Mark Twain


47. "It is the great north wind that made the Vikings."

Scandanavian proverb

Other categories: Nature and Animals


48. "Three Spaniards, four opinions."

Spanish proverb


49. "Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."

Kim Stanley Robinson, "Red Mars"

Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy


50. "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization."

Georges Clemenceau

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