The greatest veneration one can show the law is to keep a watch on it.
—Nadine Gordimer, 1971
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Quotes
To think ill of mankind, and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
—William Hazlitt, 1823Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.
—Emma Goldman, 1910If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.
—George W. Bush, 2005You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.
—Henrik Ibsen, 1882All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.
—Max Born, 1968All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
—John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977I won’t be happy till I’m as famous as God.
—Madonna, c. 1985He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.
—Emperor Francis Joseph, c. 1850Man’s great mission is not to conquer nature by main force but to cooperate with her intelligently but lovingly for his own purposes.
—Lewis Mumford, 1962I quit life as from an inn, not as from a home.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 44 BCGreat inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
—Elizabeth Charles, 1862The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
—Euripides, c. 415 BC