A shopkeeper will never get the more custom by beating his customers; and what is true of a shopkeeper is true of a shopkeeping nation.
—Josiah Tucker, 1766
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Quotes
Let my epitaph be, “Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook.”
—Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, 1790Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838Diseases are not immutable entities but dynamic social constructions that have biographies of their own.
—Robert P. Hudson, 1983No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
—Samuel Johnson, 1776A woman should never be seen eating or drinking unless it be lobster salad and champagne, the only truly feminine and becoming viands.
—Lord Byron, 1812Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking.
—La Rochefoucauld, 1665The fear of war is worse than war itself.
—Seneca, c. 50Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
—George Eliot, 1857Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—H.G. Wells, 1920Jokes are grievances.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1969Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896I am sick and tired of publicity. I want no more of it. It puts me in a bad light. I just want to be forgotten.
—Al Capone, 1929