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Quotes

Till taught by pain, / Men really know not what good water’s worth.

—Lord Byron, 1819

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.

—Victor Hugo, 1862

The money we have is the means to liberty; that which we pursue is the means to slavery.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, c. 1770

So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, c. 1950

It raineth every day, and the weather represents our tearful despair on a large scale.

—Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1865

Even a paranoid can have enemies.

—Henry Kissinger, 1977

There is no profit without another’s loss.

—Roman proverb

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

—Saint Augustine, 397

Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

—George Santayana, c. 1905

Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.

—Voltaire, 1764

Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

—Tennessee Williams, 1951

If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.

—Francis Bacon, 1615

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.

—Norman Douglas, 1917