If you stain clear water with filth, you will never find a drink.
—Aeschylus, 458 BC
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Quotes
Laws, like houses, lean on one another.
—Edmund Burke, 1765The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.
—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858As usual, what we call “progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
—Havelock Ellis, 1914If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.
—Marie Bashkirtseff, 1884Trade is a social act.
—John Stuart Mill, 1859It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790Some men never recover from education.
—Oliver St. John Gogarty, 1954I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1844The sea receives us in a proper way only when we are without clothes.
—Pliny the Elder, 77Labor is no disgrace.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCTo blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCAn election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
—George Eliot, 1866