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Quotes

No lyric poems live long or please many people which are written by drinkers of water.

—Horace, 20 BC

If law and justice do not attain their ends, the people will be unable to move hand or foot.

—Confucius, c. 500

One’s friends are divided into two classes, those one knows because one must and those one knows because one mustn’t.

—Sybil Taylor, 1922

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

—Joan Didion, 2005

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

—Rosa Luxemburg, 1918

The more religious a country is, the more crimes are committed in it.

—Napoleon Bonaparte, 1817

Nothing is hidden from the eyes of the observing world.

—Aleksandr Pushkin, 1837

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.

—Magna Carta, 1215

Our crime against criminals is that we treat them as villains.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1898

Time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions.

—James Joyce, 1922

Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944

Oligopoly, plutocracy, kleptocracy: All things that are good for a shareholder. 

—James J. Cramer, 2006

I 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