Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906
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Quotes
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, 1943Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any program our fear has sketched out.
—George Eliot, 1860Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.
—Thomas JeffersonTelevision is democracy at its ugliest.
—Paddy Chayefsky, 1976How sad a sight is human happiness to those whose thoughts can pierce beyond an hour!
—Edward Young, 1741A merchant may, perhaps, be a man of an enlarged mind, but there is nothing in trade connected with an enlarged mind.
—Samuel Johnson, 1773Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCFreedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
—Rudy Giuliani, 1999Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness.
—Joseph Addison, 1712