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Quotes

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

—Italo Calvino, 1967

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

—Marilyn Monroe, 1962

If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1843

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

—James Joyce, 1922

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706

Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.

—Blaise Pascal, 1658

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

—William Morris, 1882

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

—Virginia Woolf, 1899

Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

—Arnold Toynbee, 1948

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

—William Hazlitt, 1821

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles. 

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.

—John Steinbeck, 1941