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Quotes

The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

—Bertrand Russell, 1938

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962

If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

—John Donne, 1623

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

—George Eliot, 1857

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.

—Woody Allen, 1979

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

—Plato, c. 378 BC

Every man is worth just so much as the things he busies himself with.

—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

—Confucius, c. 515 BC

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be damned.

—Chinese proverb

The sea hath no king but God alone.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies.

—H.L. Mencken, 1925

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

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

—William Hazlitt, 1819