My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968
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Quotes
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Friends are fictions founded on some single momentary experience.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.
—Moses Mendelssohn, 1783An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.
—Maxim Gorky, 1902There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1714He makes his cook his merit, and the world visits his dinners and not him.
—Molière, 1666My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
—Karl Kraus, c. 1910To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
—John Buchan, 1940If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
—Jonathan Swift, 1706If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.
—John Donne, 1623Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
—John Berger, 1987The period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.
—George Washington, 1786