The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921
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Quotes
I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917Human happiness never remains long in the same place.
—Herodotus, c. 430 BCTime, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905Friends are ourselves.
—John Donne, 1603Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921I’ve been bathing in the poem / Of star-infused and milky sea / Devouring the azure greens.
—Arthur Rimbaud, 1871One’s body, hair, and skin are a gift from one’s parents—do not dare to allow them to be harmed.
—Classic of Filial Piety, c. 200 BCBid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.
—William Shakespeare, 1592God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
—Arthur Koestler, 1967To 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. 1872No real friendship without absolute liberty.
—George Sand, 1866A monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.
—Pliny the Younger, c. 109