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
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Quotes
Ocean. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man—who has no gills.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906Reality is always the foe of famous names.
—Petrarch, 1337Years are nothing to me—they should be nothing to you. Who asked you to count them or to consider them? In the world of wild nature, time is measured by seasons only—the bird does not know how old it is—the rose tree does not count its birthdays!
—Marie Corelli, 1911Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made—through disobedience and through rebellion.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000People react to fear, not love—they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.
—Richard Nixon, 1975Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938Business is other people’s money.
—Delphine de Girardin, 1852The law is not the same at morning and at night.
—George Herbert, c. 1633A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
—Ralph Nader, 2000We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774