The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them.
—Denis Diderot, 1777
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Quotes
Colonialism has meant selling our ore and being left with the holes.
—Samora Moisés Machel, c. 1976Curse on all laws but those which love has made.
—Alexander Pope, 1717If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.
—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.
—George W. Bush, 2005I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860Every ass thinks himself worthy to stand with the king’s horses.
—Gnomologia, 1732We are to go to law never to revenge, but only to repair.
—Samuel Pepys, 1661My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will recline.
—Tecumseh, 1810Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or racial hatred. To me all men are equal; there are flatheads everywhere and I despise them all equally.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
—Pablo Neruda, 1924There is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938