Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—Lord Acton, 1887Quotes
My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
—Timothy Leary, 1966Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal.
—David Hume, 1742Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
—Jane Austen, 1811If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625The world is wearied of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1870The happy ending is our national belief.
—Mary McCarthy, 1947Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit.
—Harriet Doerr, 1978Friendship’s a noble name, ’tis love refined.
—Susanna Centlivre, 1703Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1821Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II, 1986