All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977
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Quotes
The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876I order that my funeral ceremonies be extremely modest, and that they take place at dawn or at the evening Ave Maria, without song or music.
—Giuseppe Verdi, 1900My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
—Timothy Leary, 1966A true German can’t stand the French, / Yet willingly he drinks their wines.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.
—Simone Weil, 1934Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.
—Samuel Johnson, 1751The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.
—Salvador Dalí, 1953We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1878Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1610Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995