Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944
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Quotes
When nature is overriden, she takes her revenge.
—Marya Mannes, 1958Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1864As he brews, so shall he drink.
—Ben Jonson, 1598Make the revolution a parent of settlement and not a nursery of future revolutions.
—Edmund Burke, 1790Time robs us of all, even of memory.
—Virgil, c. 40 BCIt is the little causes, long continued, which are considered as bringing about the greatest changes of the earth.
—James Hutton, 1795Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCAfter midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.
—Amelia Earhart, 1935Where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
—George Santayana, c. 1905Nature is immovable.
—Euripides, c. 415 BCSpeech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC