Man and animals are really the conduit of food, the sepulcher of animals, and resting place of the dead, one causing the death of the other, making themselves the covering for the corruption of other dead bodies.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500
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Quotes
Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed, for it is a self-propagating one.
—Simone Weil, 1943Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.
—Miriam Makeba, 1988This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843’Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables?
—Thomas Browne, 1642To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
—George Washington, 1796What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
—Robert Burton, 1621I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955Appearances often are deceiving.
—Aesop, c. 550 BC