It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BC
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Quotes
If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962Oligopoly, plutocracy, kleptocracy: All things that are good for a shareholder.
—James J. Cramer, 2006I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
—Phyllis Rose, 1991I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.
—Madonna, c. 1985Once suspicion is aroused, everything feeds it.
—Amelia Edith Barr, 1885Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906It is hard when nature does not respect your intentions, and she never does exactly respect them.
—Wendell Berry, 1985Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCFreedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
—James Baldwin, 1961Seamen are the nearest to death and the furthest from God.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732There is no art without Eros.
—Max Frisch, 1983