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Quotes

A functioning police state needs no police.

—William S. Burroughs, 1959

Language 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, 1817

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

—Tom Robbins, 1976

Friendship’s a noble name, ’tis love refined.

—Susanna Centlivre, 1703

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

—William Shakespeare, 1603

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BC

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

—Voltaire, 1764

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

—Philip K. Dick, 1972

Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it. 

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1821

Enemies are so stimulating.

—Katharine Hepburn, 1969

I said of laughter, “It is mad,” and of pleasure, “What use is it?”

—Book of Ecclesiastes, 225 BC

We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

—John Winthrop, 1630

A jest breaks no bones.

—Samuel Johnson, 1781