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Quotes

There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal, than this race for profit.

—Helen Keller, 1928

He who treats another human being as divine thereby assigns to himself the relative status of a child or an animal.

—E. R. Dodds, 1951

Don’t lose your mind unless you have paid for it.

—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957

In all the ancient states and empires, those who had the shipping, had the wealth.

—William Petty, 1690

The populace may hiss me, but when I go home and think of my money, I applaud myself.

—Horace, c. 25 BC

I shall embrace my rival—until I suffocate him.

—Jean Racine, 1669

We often give our enemies the means for our own destruction.

—Aesop, c. 600 BC

The law is far, the fist is near.

—Korean proverb

The planet keeps to the astronomer’s timetable, but the wind still bloweth almost where it listeth.

—John Henry Poynting, 1899

I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

—Sarah Williams, 1868

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

—George Eliot, c. 1872

The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835