Whenever there is excess, an ax remedies it.
—Sumerian proverb
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Quotes
A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?
—Ronald Reagan, 1965War is fear cloaked in courage.
—William Westmoreland, 1966Luck is believing you’re lucky.
—William Carlos Williams, 1947Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
—Herman Melville, 1851A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
—Jane Austen, 1814Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
—Phyllis McGinley, 1957He who would have clear water should go to the fountainhead.
—Italian proverbWhen we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1657Machines 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, 1934