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Quotes

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth. Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

—Julie Burchill, 1986

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

—Sammy Davis Jr., 1965

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!

—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1843

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue than why I have one.

—Cato the Elder, c. 184 BC

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

Most authors seek fame, but I seek for justice—a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.

—Davy Crockett, 1834

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

—Martin Luther, c. 1530

If fame is only to come after death, I am in no hurry for it.

—Martial, c. 86

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

—E. R. Dodds, 1951

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself. 

—Samuel Johnson, 1763

Reality is always the foe of famous names.

—Petrarch, 1337