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Quotes

Never trust her at any time when the calm sea shows her false alluring smile.

—Lucretius, c. 60 BC

The law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.

—Voltairine de Cleyre, 1890

He laughs best who laughs last.

—French proverb

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

—Heinrich Heine, 1827

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

—Mao Zedong, 1938

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850

If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.

—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884

They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.

—Virgil, c. 30 BC

Imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.

—Henry Ward Beecher, 1887

It is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.

—Plautus, c. 193 BC

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1790

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

—Cormac McCarthy, 2005

Commerce has made all winds her ministers.

—John Sterling, 1843