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Quotes

Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.

—Lucretius, c. 58 BC

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

—B.F. Skinner, 1964

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

—John Locke, 1690

To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.

—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994

Man is a tool-using animal. Nowhere do you find him without tools; without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

—Thomas Carlyle, 1836

Animals are good to think with.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1962

A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.

—Ethiopian proverb

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

—Virginia Woolf, 1929

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

—Carl Sandburg, 1959

There is no greater disaster than not to know contentment.

—Laozi, c. 550 BC

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

The world began without man, and it will end without him.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955