Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,159,190 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
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Books and reading
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“Concerning Stalin's merits, an entirely sufficient number of books, pamphlets and studies had already been written in his lifetime. The role of Stalin in the preparation and execution of the socialist revolution, in the Civil War, and in the fight for the construction of socialism in our country, is universally known.”
Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Stalinist Legacy (1984)
“If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do it. But in fact the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments.”
Paul Graham (born 1964) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not Always spoken the truth in my books? And now You treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn me!”
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A response to the Nazi book burnings, "The Burning of the Books" ("Die Bücherverbrennung", c. 1935)
“The Interpretation of the Laws of Nature in a Common-wealth, dependeth not on the books of Moral Philosophy. The Authority of writers, without the Authority of the Commonwealth, maketh not their opinions Law, be they never so true.”
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) said by 1679 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How like humans,” he said drily. “The universe is vast, majestic, intricate, patterned with inexhaustible beauty, vivid with infinitely varied life—and there’s only one thing in it that really interests you. The same thing that makes you buy books, build families, create atomic theories (I imagine) or, once upon a time, write poetry. Sex.”
Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books are the gardens of scholars.”
Ali (599–661) said by 661 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can't help reflecting that it's taken a Government headed by a housewife with experience of running a family to balance the books for the first time in twenty years—with a little left over for a rainy day.”
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to Conservative Women's Conference (25 May 1988)
“My wealth is my shelf of books!”
Jack Vance (1916–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.”
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel like I own all the kids in the world because, since I've never grown up myself, all my books are automatically for children. … It's mutual delight and love made manifest. For one thing, kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.”
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. (New York Review of Books, 2011)”
Freeman Dyson (1923–2020) said by 2020 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I absolutely did not start writing these books to encourage any child into witchcraft. [...] I'm laughing slightly because to me, the idea is absurd.”
J. K. Rowling (born 1965) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales's secretary.”
J. K. Rowling (born 1965) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) said by 1860 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit.”
Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) said by 1931 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By force you can make hypocrites -- men who will agree with you from the teeth out, and in their hearts hate you. We want no more hypocrites. We have enough in every community. And how are you going to keep from having more? By having the air free, -- by wiping from your statute books such miserable and infamous laws as this.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) said by 1899 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The theology taught by Milton was dear to the Puritan heart. It was accepted by New England, and it poisoned the souls and ruined the lives of thousands. The genius of Shakespeare could not make the theology of Milton poetic. In the literature of the world there is nothing, outside of the “sacred books,” more perfectly absurd.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) said by 1899 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books were written and annotated, systems evolved, the writings of the ancients collected, missals illuminated, the people’s belief fostered, the people’s credulity smiled upon. Here there was all, and room for everything, belief and learning, depths and simplicity, the wisdom of the Greeks and the Evangelists, black magic and white - all had their uses.”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I, who could not decipher or understand one thousandth part of those millions of scripts, books, pictures and references in the archives! Humbled, unspeakably foolish, unspeakably ridiculous, not understanding myself, feeling extremely small, I saw myself... p. 76”
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) said by 1962 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
“But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.”
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) said by 1882 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.”
Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906–1963) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essays on Education quoted in The New York Times (24 February 1959).
“Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.”
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gravity’s books have got to balance.”
Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) said by 1988 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books — but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!”
Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1992, as quoted by Tom Tomorrow in his comic strip This Modern World (21 February 2000)
“Six hundred years before the birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers passed to aristocracies of birth.”
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) said by 1902 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emily Dickinson didn't even publish books, she just wrote these demented little poems with a quill pen and hid them in her desk, but they still fought their way into the world, and lasted on and on and on. It's damned hard to get rid of Emily Dickinson, she hangs on like a tick in a dog's ear.”
Bruce Sterling (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For God's sake don't put my books into the Thomas Edison kinetoscope... don't tie my words and my thoughts to the fate of a piece of hardware, because hardware is even more mortal than I am, and I'm a hell of a lot more mortal than I care to be.”
Bruce Sterling (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mortality is one good reason why I'm writing books in the first place. For God's sake don't make me keep pace with the hardware, because I'm not really in the business of keeping pace, I'm really in the business of marking place.”
Bruce Sterling (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have no idea why some of my books draw awards and others don't, except that the ones I spent the least time worrying about other people's response to — that I wrote for myself — seem to do the best of all.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not all books are created equal, and for the special ones, you begin to know it sometimes even before the work is finished, but always by the time you slam that last line home and shriek, "Done! Done!," and fall head-down across your keyboard like the runner from Marathon.”
Lois McMaster Bujold (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was suggested by the late Alfred Knopf that books should be graded like eggs, and that publishing houses should not offer as First Class what they well know to be Fifth. But of course publishers cannot agree about standards for grading, and even if they could, writers would shriek like mandrakes uprooted if their work were sent into the world marked anything less than Strictly Fresh.”
Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all have slumbering realms of sensibility which can be coaxed into wakefulness by books.”
Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The national Log Cabin Republicans are ridiculous. They’re not conservative at all. I don’t even think they’re gay — they’re bi (partisan). GOProud is comprised of real conservatives who happen to be gay. (Same with the Texas LCRs, for whom I’ve been signing books for years.)”
Ann Coulter (born 1961) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dear Mainstream Media Reporter Who Wasted My Time Human Events (February 2, 2011).
“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.”
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) said by 1784 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A hot topic of late, expressed most notably in 's best-selling books, has emphasized the role of positive attitude in combating such serious diseases as cancer. From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
“Like any admirer of Celtic myth, I was eager to have a go at depicting Cernunnos, the antlered god. I often sit with one of my many books on the subject and look in awe at the reproduction of the Gunderstrup Cauldron, on which he appears.”
John Howe (illustrator) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.”
Robert Silverberg (born 1935) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Sigmund Freud, as quoted in Sigmund Says: And Other Psychotherapists' Quotes (2006) edited by Bernard Nisenholz, p. 6
“That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered “masterpieces,” or at least what journalists call “great books,” is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself.”
Erasmus (1466–1536) first seen 1497 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Christian Northoff (1497), as translated in Collected Works of Erasmus (1974), p. 115
“No furniture so charming as books.”
Sydney Smith (1771–1845) said by 1845 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I shout: Ideal, Ideal, Ideal Knowledge, Knowledge, Knowledge, Boomboom, Boomboom, Boomboom I have recorded fairly accurately Progress, Law, Morals, and all the other magnificent qualities that various very intelligent people have discussed in so many books.”
Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Dada Almanac: Berlin 1920, (1983) ed. Richard Huelsenbeck, transl. Malcolm Green, p.127
“Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The number of books is infinite.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) said by 1824 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People of intelligence often treat business in the way ignorant people treat books: they understand nothing.”
Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) said by 1824 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source