Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867
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Quotes
People can say what they like about the eternal verities, love and truth and so on, but nothing’s as eternal as the dishes.
—Margaret Mahy, 1985The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger, 1984Hate must make a man productive. Otherwise one might as well love.
—Karl Kraus, 1912Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
—George Santayana, 1920He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCTo teach is to learn twice over.
—Joseph Joubert, c. 1805The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better, only the god knows.
—Socrates, 399 BCHe who laugheth too much, hath the nature of a fool; he that laugheth not at all, hath the nature of an old cat.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732To 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. 1872Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?
—Philip Johnson, 1965The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
—John Locke, 1695