Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.
—Jacob Burckhardt, c. 1875
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Quotes
What mighty contests rise from trivial things.
—Alexander Pope, 1712The men of today are born to criticize; of Achilles they see only the heel.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1880The happiness of society is the end of government.
—John Adams, 1776A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.
—William Blake, 1807Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live.
—Anatole Broyard, 1989The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
—André Breton, 1937People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.
—James Baldwin, 1953Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade, 1797I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.
—John Paul Jones, 1778What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.
—Joseph Addison, 1711The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
—Vladimir Nabokov, 1941The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851