A Curated Selection of Quotes (February 2025)

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“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

— Zora Neale Hurston

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"I stay woke but I take naps."

— Dr. Brittney Cooper

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"When you hate, the only person that is suffering is you because most of the people you hate don’t know it and the rest don't care."

- Medgar Evers

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"You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go."

- Jeannette Rankin

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“Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.”

— Tennessee Williams

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"We love the things we love for what they are."

- Robert Frost

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"To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one."

- Colette

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"Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds."

— Raymond Chandler

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"To blame the poor for subsisting on welfare has no justice unless we are also willing to judge every rich member of society by how productive he or she is. Taken individual by individual, it is likely that there's more idleness and abuse of government favors among the economically privileged than among the ranks of the disadvantaged."

- Norman Mailer

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“The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.”

- Vince Lombardi

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"Science can, in the end, never tell us what to do with its breakthroughs— that's up to us."

— Samuel Mohn

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"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

- Nelson Mandela

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"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough."

- Toni Morrison

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"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

- Ansel Adams

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“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

— William James

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"It is good to rub and polish your mind against that of others."

- Michel de Montaigne

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"It is better to look ahead and prepare than to look back and regret."

- Jackie Joyner-Kersee

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“The poets are wrong of course. ... But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”

— William Faulkner

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“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.”

— William Faulkner

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“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. […] And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

— Hannah Arendt

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“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

— Hannah Arendt

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“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

— Carl Jung

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"The culture always changes first. And then everything else adapts to it."

- Ted Gioia

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"However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

- Stanley Kubrick

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