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Quotes

I cannot bear a parent’s tears.

—Virgil, c. 25 BC

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

—H.L. Mencken, 1920

All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 250 BC

Despotism achieves great things illegally; democracy doesn’t even take the trouble to achieve small things legally.

—Honoré de Balzac, 1831

All the married heiresses I have known have shipwrecked.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880

Men are generally more pleased with a widespread than with a great reputation.

—Pliny the Younger, c. 110

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

—Shimon Peres, 1995

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

—St. Paul, c. 50

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

—Saint Augustine, 397

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

—John Updike, 1963

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

—Edmund Burke, 1765

There are some who, if a cat accidentally comes into the room, though they neither see it nor are told of it, will presently be in a sweat and ready to die away.

—Increase Mather, 1684