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Quotes

Machines seem to sense that I am afraid of them. It makes them hostile.

—Sharyn McCrumb, 1990

Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.

—John Updike, 1989

A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

—Tacitus, c. 100

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty, and death of public opinion.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1902

Do you not see how God is praised by those in the heavens and those on earth? The very birds praised Him as they wing their way.

—The Qur’an, c. 620

Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

—Edith Wharton, 1905

A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

—Herman Melville, 1851

Disobedience, 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, 1891

The human mind is an evolutionary product, just like the human body.

—Tetsuro Matsuzawa, 2010

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

—Leonard Cohen, 1966

If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.

—Congolese proverb

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

—Ray Bradbury, 1992