Fate leads the willing and drags along those who hang back.
—Cleanthes, c. 250 BC
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Quotes
There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself.
—Samuel Johnson, 1763What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
—Frederick Douglass, 1855By night an atheist half believes a God.
—Edward Young, c. 1745I have often been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire.
—Thucydides, c. 404 BCEven members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330Mammon, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.
—Raymond Chandler, 1945A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers; and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
—Josiah Tucker, 1766In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.
—Anna Jameson, 1846The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921Better no law than no law enforced.
—Danish proverb