The past is always tense and the future, perfect.
—Zadie Smith, 2000
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Quotes
Those who cross the seas change their climate but not their character.
—Roman proverbThere are many civil questions that arise between individuals in which it is not so important the controversy be settled one way or another as that it be settled.
—William Howard Taft, 1921Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
—Flannery O’Connor, 1964The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities.
—John Lothrop Motley, 1858Those who believe in freedom of the will have never loved and never hated.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1893What is the city but the people?
—William Shakespeare, 1608Machines do not run in order to enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may serve the machines.
—Simone Weil, 1934The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.
—Al Smith, 1933We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things, and once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavor to erase them.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860