The man in constant fear is every day condemned.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC
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Quotes
In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.
—Simon Hoggart, 1990If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.
—Samuel Johnson, 1777Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.
—Thomas JeffersonAll the married heiresses I have known have shipwrecked.
—Benjamin Disraeli, 1880Those who believe in freedom of the will have never loved and never hated.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1893Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1942I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
—George Eliot, 1876Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.
—Vladimir Lenin, 1923There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching toward him and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
—Elias Canetti, 1960Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
—E.B. White, 1944