Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
—George Washington, 1796
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Quotes
The more laws, the more lawbreakers.
—Tao Te Ching, c. 500 BCThe aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCLanguage is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.
—Aristotle, c. 350 BCI had rather be in a state of misery and envied for my supposed happiness than in a state of happiness and pitied for my supposed misery.
—Elizabeth Inchbald, 1793And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
—Walt Whitman, 1855Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330Gossip isn’t scandal and it’s not merely malicious. It’s chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.
—Phyllis McGinley, 1957Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1838Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?
—Stanisław Lem, 1961Our allotted time is the passing of a shadow.
—Book of Wisdom, c. 100 BC