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Quotes

The fox knows lots of tricks, the hedgehog only one—but it’s a winner.

—Archilochus, c. 650 BC

No one makes a revolution by himself, and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

—George Sand, 1851

Man is merely a more perfect animal than the rest. He reasons better.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1816

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

—Ira Berkow, 1987

It is not my design to drink or sleep; my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.

—Oliver Cromwell, 1658

Seek not water, only show you are thirsty, / That water may spring up all around you.

—Rumi, c. 1260

These useless men ought to be cut up and served at a banquet. I really believe that athletes have less intelligence than swine.

—Dio Chrysostom, c. 95

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

—Flannery O’Connor, 1964

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

The self is like an infant: given free rein, it craves to suckle.

—al-Busiri, c. 1250

The law is far, the fist is near.

—Korean proverb

Music today is nothing more than the art of performing difficult pieces.

—Voltaire, 1759

Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.

—Thomas Hughes, 1857