For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
—Jane Austen, 1813
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Quotes
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.
—Fernando Pessoa, c. 1935Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.
—Philip Stubbes, 1583We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.
—Richard P. Feynman, 1965Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
—Hebrews, c. 60Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947There are some who, if a cat accidentally comes into the room, though they neither see it nor are told of it, will presently be in a sweat and ready to die away.
—Increase Mather, 1684No man ever distinguished himself who could not bear to be laughed at.
—Maria Edgeworth, 1809No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.
—Emma Goldman, 1917It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
—John Locke, 1690