Wit enables us to act rudely with impunity.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1678
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Quotes
The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing.”
—Daniel Boorstin, 1961Making 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, 1962Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.
—Che Guevara, 1965The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 175The period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.
—George Washington, 1786To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1890How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857All law is of necessity defective in the beginning.
—Han Yu, c. 800What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1852One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
—George Santayana, c. 1914Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.
—Book of Job, c. 600 BCAnyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
—William Hazlitt, 1821