If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1843
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Quotes
What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971In life our absent friend is far away: / But death may bring our friend exceeding near.
—Christina Rossetti, 1881The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1911The happy ending is our national belief.
—Mary McCarthy, 1947The money we have is the means to liberty; that which we pursue is the means to slavery.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, c. 1770Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Drink does not drown care but waters it, and makes it grow faster.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1749Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.
—Edward Gibbon, 1776An old man is twice a child, and so is a drunken man.
—Plato, c. 360 BCWe are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, c. 1922