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Quotes

No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water drinkers.

—Horace, 35 BC

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75

He that serves God for money will serve the Devil for better wages.

—Roger L’Estrange, 1692

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.

—Edward Gibbon, 1776

A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong.

—Ecclesiasticus, c. 180 BC

If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

—Margaret Atwood, 2005

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

—John Nance Garner, c. 1967

Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BC

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

—George Eliot, 1857

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

—Edward VIII, 1957

A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in / A minute to smile and an hour to weep in.

—Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895

All progress is based upon a universal, innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1890