There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
—H.L. Mencken, 1920
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Quotes
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
—Aldous Huxley, 1929The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
—Laurence Sterne, 1760Punishment is a sort of medicine.
—Aristotle, c. 340 BCAn ape will be an ape, though clad in purple.
—Erasmus, 1511Revolutions never go backward.
—Thomas Skidmore, 1829Ah, there are no children nowadays.
—Molière, 1673Thou art not to learn the humors and tricks of that old bald cheater, time.
—Ben Jonson, 1601In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.
—Samuel Butler, c. 1902Idolatry is the mother of all games.
—Novatian, c. 255The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.
—Frantz Fanon, 1952