Envy and hatred are apt to blind the eyes and render them unable to behold things as they are.
—Margaret of Valois, c. 1600
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Quotes
An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
—Henry Clay, 1842All of the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.
—Antonín Dvořák, 1893Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows and, looking at each other with grief and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.
—Blaise Pascal, 1669Like a broken gong be still, be silent. Know the stillness of freedom where there is no more striving.
—Siddhartha Gautama, c. 500 BCRivalry is the whetstone of talent.
—Roman proverbI am a living symbol of the white man’s fear.
—Winnie Mandela, 1985To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.
—Milan Kundera, 1978Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
—John Berger, 1987There’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1600Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
—Arthur Miller, 2001No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.
—Horace, 20 BC