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Quotes

Fame is no sanctuary from the passing of youth. Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.

—Julie Burchill, 1986

The human working stock is of interest only insofar as it is profitable.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1970

Think rich. Look poor.

—Andy Warhol, 1975

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821

Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together.

—Anaïs Nin, 1939

Each night’s new terror drives away the terror of the night before.

—Sophocles, c. 450 BC

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

—Confucius, c. 515 BC

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

—Erich Fromm, 1941

Memory is necessary for all operations of reasoning.

—Blaise Pascal, c. 1658

If the people be the governors, who shall be governed?

—John Cotton, c. 1636

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence, the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

—Mary Renault, 1956

To safeguard one’s health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.

—La Rochefoucauld, 1678

Wherever commerce prevails there will be an inequality of wealth, and wherever the latter does a simplicity of manners must decline.

—James Madison, 1783