What, 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, 1855
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Quotes
Machines seem to sense that I am afraid of them. It makes them hostile.
—Sharyn McCrumb, 1990Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.
—Albert Einstein, 1929It’s frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself… it seems unfair. You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1966What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850To safeguard one’s health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1678Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.
—George Gershwin, 1933There was a great deal of drinking among us but little drunkenness. We all seemed to feel that Prohibition was a personal affront and that we had a moral duty to undermine it.
—Elizabeth Anderson, 1969Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, 1946The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.
—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1817Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture, to us, and a mirror.
—Alain de Lille, c. 1200Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
—Immanuel Kant, 1784So many men, so many opinions.
—Terence, 161 BC