Everything that deceives does so by casting a spell.
—Plato, c. 375 BC
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Quotes
People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.
—Richard Nixon, 1975The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk happy.
—Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958The king times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end.
—Lord Byron, 1821Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Arthur C. Clarke, 1973If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1513Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838The earth is our existence, and our body is attached to the earth.
—Daulat Qazi, c. 1650It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.
—Mary Lease, c. 1890Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
—Georges Bataille, 1957You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
—Cormac McCarthy, 2005I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.
—Thomas Malory, c. 1470