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Quotes

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

—Anna Sewell, 1877

The world is wearied of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1870

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it.

—John Ruskin, 1850

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

—Frank Zappa, 1989

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

—Herman Melville, 1851

my mind is
a big hunk of irrevocable nothing

—E.E. Cummings, 1923

Tomorrow never comes, man. It’s all the same fucking day.

—Janis Joplin, 1972

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

—W. Russell Brain, 1952

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.

—Harriet Doerr, 1978

Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.

—J. Paul Getty

Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower rungs of the economic ladder are being lopped off.

—Bayard Rustin, 1965

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all.

—Eva Perón, 1949

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