Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BC
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Quotes
Mammon, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911The young always have the same problem—how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their elders and copying one another.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968How like to us is that filthy beast the ape.
—Cicero, 45 BCI have seen the science I worshipped, and the aircraft I loved, destroying the civilization I expected them to serve.
—Charles Lindbergh, 1948Unfortunately, humanitarianism has been the mark of an inhuman time.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1932Inventions that are not made, like babies that are not born, are rarely missed.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
—Fanny Burney, 1782The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.
—Marcel Proust, 1919Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France, 1881If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
—Michael Harrington, 1962Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.
—Sumerian proverbWere 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, 1849