Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1871
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Quotes
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.
—Virginia Woolf, 1927Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.
—Socrates, c. 430 BCNothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 63 BCThere will always be a lost dog somewhere that will prevent me from being happy.
—Jean Anouilh, 1934People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?
—Lord Byron, 1813No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.
—Emma Goldman, 1917The human working stock is of interest only insofar as it is profitable.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1970It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—Friedrich Schiller, 1781I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
—Galileo Galilei, 1615To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.
—Plutarch, c. 100