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Quotes

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

—Michel Foucault, 1975

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

—Mary Renault, 1956

There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.

—George Eliot, 1859

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

—W. Russell Brain, 1952

A joke is at most a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.

—George Orwell, 1945

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

—Honoré de Balzac, 1847

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

—Edward Gorey, 1974

By night an atheist half believes a God.

—Edward Young, c. 1745

When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.

—Thomas Nashe, 1594

Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?

—Victor Hugo, 1862

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928

As he brews, so shall he drink.

—Ben Jonson, 1598

Good fortune is light as a feather, but nobody knows how to hold it up. Misfortune is heavy as the earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of its way.

—Zhuangzi, c. 300 BC