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Quotes

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

—William Blake, 1793

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

—Hannah Arendt, 1972

Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

—George Eliot, 1860

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.

—Albert Einstein, 1930

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

—George Bernard Shaw, 1944

Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.

—Charles Dickens, 1843

Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

—William James, 1902

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

—Gustave Flaubert, 1871

The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.

—Juvenal, c. 125