Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure.
—Anaxagoras, c. 450 BC
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Quotes
Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
—Joan Didion, 2005Every gift has a personality—that of its giver.
—Nuruddin Farah, 1992It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
—Lewis Strauss, 1954We need strength, we need energy, we need quickness, and we need brain in this country to turn it around.
—Donald Trump, 2015To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1949It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street.
—Mary Lease, c. 1890In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
—Herodotus, 440 BCLiberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Abstainer, n. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley, 1926A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.
—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987There 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, 1763