Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
—Rudy Giuliani, 1999
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Quotes
The law makes ten criminals where it restrains one.
—Voltairine de Cleyre, 1890They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
—Francis Bacon, 1605Brains are the only things worth having in this world.
—L. Frank Baum, 1899A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
—Chinua Achebe, 1958Time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters, but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
—Edith Wharton, 1905Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891In time history must become a fairy tale—it will become again what it was in the beginning.
—Novalis, c. 1798What are men anyway but balloons on legs, a lot of blown-up bladders?
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 64In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.
—V.S. Pritchett, 1968Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.
—Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BCOnce something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.
—Robert Wilson, 1991