Archive

"He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive," Joseph Heller, Catch 22, page 29.

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness," - Joseph Welch, army lawyer, saying the lines that would end Joseph McCarthy's career, 9 June 1954

"The journalist can bring you up in the world nicely. Or the journalist can destroy you," Idi "Big Daddy" Amin, Ugandan dictator in last interview before his death in 2003.

"Peterson, you idiot, stay out of this," Nassim Nicholas Taleb, statistician, responding to Jordan Peterson after he attempted to call Taleb out for refusing to go on Lex Fridman's podcast.

"Anyone who's got anything to fear from such revelations should be scared," - Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin's former bodyguard, discussing the secrets he held about his enemies, 11 February 1997

"I have the right to do what I want!" - Nicholai Ceausescu, President of Romania, 25 December 1989, reaction to realisation he was about to be executed by firing squad on Christmas Day.

“We now have 28 flavors --that’s more than Howard Johnson’s has.” - Fidel Castro, on the success of his socialist ice creamy, as recalled by journalist Georgie Anne Geyer in 'Buying the Night Flight'

"It is important the public recognize the existence of weighty scientific views which old there is no proof that cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer," - John Wiley Hill, 24 December 1953

"The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years." - Milton Friedman, "economist", The Power of Choice (January 2007)

"You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. [...] We must dare to invent the future." - Thomas Sankara, President of Burkina Faso, 1985