An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.
—Maxim Gorky, 1902
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Quotes
In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817The future comes like an unwelcome guest.
—Edmund Gosse, 1873If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.
—John Paul Jones, 1778I used to think that everyone was just being funny. But now I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell?
—Andy Warhol, 1970It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Traveling is like gambling: it is ever connected with winning and losing, and generally where least expected we receive more or less than we hoped for.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left.
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1960A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.
—Tom Robbins, 1976Any serious attempt to do anything worthwhile is ritualistic.
—Derek Walcott, 1986