When poets don’t know what to say and have completely given up on the play, just like a finger, they lift the machine and the spectators are satisfied.
—Antiphanes, c. 350 BC
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Quotes
The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
—Leviticus, c. 600 BCThe whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.
—Gustave Flaubert, 1871While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.
—Andrea Dworkin, 1983Alas! We are ridiculous animals.
—Horace Walpole, 1777In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Sex and drugs and rock and roll.
—Ian Dury, 1977Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.
—Ben Jonson, 1601In revolutions men fall and rise. Long before this war is over, much as you hear me praised now, you may hear me cursed and insulted.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1864That which is evil is soon learned.
—John Ray, 1670There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.
—Mark Twain, 1897The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.
—Laozi