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# Weekend Words: Weed
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-weed/
- Published: 2014-10-26T13:30:18.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:32:35.000Z
- Description: On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, High Times Magazine has issued High Times: A 40-Year History of the World’s Most Infamous Magazine, which The New York Times calls "a coffee table book for low, sticky coffee tables."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![weed](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/10/weed.jpg)

Vincent van Gogh, “Burning Weeds” (July 1883), lithograph, 155 x 265 mm. Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. (image via Web Gallery of Art)

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, *High Times Magazine* has issued *High Times: A 40-Year History of the World’s Most Infamous Magazine*, which *The New York Times* [calls](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/books/high-times-a-40-year-history-of-the-magazine.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&ref=hyperallergic.com) “a coffee table book for low, sticky coffee tables.”

> “O thou weed!  
> Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet  
> That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born!”  
>  
> **—Shakespeare, *Othello***

> “Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys,  
> Unfriendly to society’s chief joys.”  
>  
> **—William Cowper, “Conversation” (on tobacco)**

> “Vain are the thousand creeds  
> That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,  
> Worthless as withered weeds  
> Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.”  
>  
> **—Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul Is Mine”**

> “What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.”  
>  
> **—Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Fortune of the Republic* (1879)**

> “When people will not weed their own minds, they apt to be overrun with weeds.”  
>  
> **—Horace Walpole, letter to Countess of Ailesbury (1779)**

> “He who hunts for flowers will find flowers; and he who loves weeds will find weeds.”  
>  
> **—Henry Ward Beecher**

> “Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?”  
>  
> **—Emma Goldman**

> “I thought love would adapt itself  
> to my needs.  
> But needs grow too fast;  
> they come up like weeds.  
> Through cracks in the conversation.  
> Through silences in the dark.  
> Through everything you thought was concrete.”  
>  
> **—Alice Walker, “Did This Happen to Your Mother? Did Your Sister Throw Up a Lot?”**