As our politics reach the boiling point, we should pause to remember the 315th birthday of Anders Celsius, who invented the scale in which water freezes at 0 and boils at 100.
Enquire not what boils in another’s pot.
—Thomas Fuller
It may make your blood boil and your mind may not be changed, but the practice of listening to opposing views is essential for effective citizenship. It is essential for our democracy.
—Barack Obama, University of Michigan Commencement (2010)
Has it popular sovereignty not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?
—Abraham Lincoln
The only safe pleasure for a parliamentarian is a bag of boiled sweets.
—Julian Critchley
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast;
And Thisby, tarrying in mulberry shade,
His dagger drew, and died.—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A calcined, scalped, rasped, scraped, flayed, broiled, powdered, leprous, blotched, mangy, grimy, parboiled country without trees, water, grass, fields … it is infinitely liker hell than earth, and one looks for tails among the people.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, describing a part of France
Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbacks from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.
—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz
We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.
—Jean Baudrillard
We boil at different degrees.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Eloquence”
Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.
—Calvin Trillin
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
