Sourced and curated.

Imagine we are linked not ranked.

Beloved · 1987

★ 7.8

In this fall, this is very tough, in this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.

2021

★ 7.1

TV broadcast

LeBron James

2010

★ 7.1

I know why the caged bird sings!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

1899

★ 7.0

It's what we learn after we think we know it all that counts.

Frank McKinney Hubbard

1913

★ 6.9

Song · Protest song · Soul music

War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Edwin Starr

War · 1970

★ 6.3

Magazine

It takes a village to raise a child.

I am interested in the future because I expect to spend the rest of my life in the future.

1984

★ 6.3

Charles F. Kettering

1939

★ 6.0

And though hard be the task, "Keep a stiff upper lip."

Phoebe Cary

1870

★ 5.4

Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?

Tecumseh

1810

★ 5.3

These lands are ours. No one has a right to remove us, because we were the first owners. The Great Spirit above has appointed this place for us, on which to light our fires, and here we will remain. As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge any.

Tecumseh

1810

★ 5.3

Interview

There is no such thing as justice-in or out of court.

Clarence Darrow

1936

★ 5.3

Short story

I am a lover and have not found my thing to love.

Sherwood Anderson

1919

★ 5.2

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of city architecture.

Philip C. Johnson

1955

★ 5.2

We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing.

John Dean

1973

★ 5.2

Making the decision to have a child-it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Elizabeth Stone

1985

★ 5.2

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

The Uses of Sorrow · 2006

★ 5.2

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

James Arlington Wright

1961

★ 5.1

Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.

Gary Shilling

1986

★ 5.1

Novel

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

The horseless vehicle is the coming wonder.

Beloved · 1987

★ 3.9

Interview · Newspaper

Thomas Edison

1895

★ 3.8

Magazine

Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the solution.

1982

★ 3.8

Essay

My back is thick with scars for protesting my freedom.

1994

★ 3.8

Film · Historical drama (film) · Drama (film) · Historical drama · Drama

Solomon Northup

12 Years a Slave · 2013

★ 3.8

Comic strip

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

Bill Watterson

Calvin and Hobbes · 1989

★ 3.7

Comic strip

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.

Bill Watterson

Calvin and Hobbes · 1992

★ 3.7

Song · Alternative rock

I hurt myself today To see if I still feel.

Nine Inch Nails

Hurt · 1994

★ 3.7

Speech

Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun.

Tecumseh

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee · 1799

★ 3.6

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

I know it when I see it.

Potter Stewart

Jacobellis v. Ohio · 1964

★ 3.6

Essay · Magazine

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke; that's their natural and first weapon.

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

1972

★ 3.6

Judith Butler

1990

★ 3.6

America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration.

Warren G. Harding

1920

★ 3.5

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Howell Forgy

1941

★ 3.5

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Martin Mull

1979

★ 3.5

Speech

I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral conditions of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other.... I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.

Clarence Darrow

1902

★ 3.5

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

William Strunk, Jr.

1919

★ 3.5

Historical literature · Scientific literature

As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice-there is no standard higher than the the assent of the relevant community. To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists.

Thomas Kuhn

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions · 1962

★ 3.5

When it's over I don't want to wonder If I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

When Death Comes · 1992

★ 3.5

For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country.

Charles E. Wilson

1953

★ 3.4

If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.

Philip Henry Sheridan

1866

★ 2.8

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

Phyllis Diller

1966

★ 2.8

Letter

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

1864

★ 2.7

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind-wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

1978

★ 2.1

Novel

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Beloved · 1987

★ 2.1

Comic strip

Bill Watterson

Calvin and Hobbes · 1988

★ 2.1

Film · Historical drama (film) · Drama (film) · Historical drama · Drama

I don't want to survive. I want to live.

Solomon Northup

12 Years a Slave · 2013

★ 2.1

I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected.

There is no substitute for hard work.

1884

★ 2.0

Autobiography and memoir

Thomas Edison

1932

★ 2.0

Interview · Magazine

Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison

1932

★ 2.0

Letter

We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

1864

★ 1.9

Letter

1864

★ 1.9

Upon one point there is entire unanimity in public sentiment—that conflicting claims to the Presidency must be amicably and peaceably adjusted, and that when so adjusted the general acquiescence of the nation ought surely to follow.

Rutherford B. Hayes

Inaugural Address of Rutherford B. Hayes · 1877

★ 1.9

Under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.

James A. Garfield

Inaugural Address of James A. Garfield · 1881

★ 1.9

If in other lands it be high treason to compass the death of the king, it shall be counted no less a crime here to strangle our sovereign power and stifle its voice.

James A. Garfield

Inaugural Address of James A. Garfield · 1881

★ 1.9

The privileges of American citizenship are so great and its duties so grave that we may well insist upon a good knowledge of every person applying for citizenship and a good knowledge by him of our institutions. We should not cease to be hospitable to immigration, but we should cease to be careless as to the character of it.

Inaugural Address of Benjamin Harrison · 1889

★ 1.9

If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with their operations.

Inaugural Address of Benjamin Harrison · 1889

★ 1.9

God has placed upon our head a diadem and has laid at our feet power and wealth beyond definition or calculation. But we must not forget that we take these gifts upon the condition that justice and mercy shall hold the reins of power and that the upward avenues of hope shall be free to all the people.

Inaugural Address of Benjamin Harrison · 1889

★ 1.9

A community where law is the rule of conduct and where courts, not mobs, execute its penalties is the only attractive field for business investments and honest labor.