Do you suppose it possible to know democracy without knowing the people?
—Xenophon, c. 370 BC
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Quotes
The Mediterranean has the colors of a mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet—you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has taken on a tinge of pink or gray.
—Vincent van Gogh, 1888’Tis the destroyer, or the devil, that scatters plagues about the world.
—Cotton Mather, 1693Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
—Flannery O’Connor, 1964Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
—Juvenal, c. 121There is nothing sillier than a silly laugh.
—Catullus, c. 60 BCI am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792Why is not a rat as good as a rabbit? Why should men eat shrimps and neglect cockroaches?
—Henry Ward Beecher, 1862Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.
—Shimon Peres, 1995Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.
—Chinese proverbThe history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902Even a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger, 1977