There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
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Quotes
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
—Samuel Johnson, 1773It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.
—Charlotte Brontë, 1847If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849The peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961Friends are ourselves.
—John Donne, 1603One may like the love and despise the lover.
—George Farquhar, 1706Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
—B.F. Skinner, 1964Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1787I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
—Anacharsis, c. 550 BC