All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BC
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Quotes
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
—Hannah Arendt, 1963The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.
—Heinrich Heine, 1827In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
—Colette, 1944Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819It would seem that in history it’s never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.
—Sybille Bedford, 1963All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full.
—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCWhen you name yourself, you always name another.
—Bertolt Brecht, 1926Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.
—Bharati Mukherjee, 1999When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.
—Desmond Tutu, 1984One man’s loss is another man’s profit.
—Michel de Montaigne, c. 1580Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580