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Quotes

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

Without virtue, both riches and honor, to me, seem like the passing cloud.

—Confucius, c. 350 BC

If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988

Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions, as it were, by the way, in the course of their everyday life.

—Elizabeth Charles, 1862

A bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures.

—Seneca the Younger, c. 64

To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.

—Fernando Pessoa, c. 1935

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

—William Blake, c. 1790

The wonderful sea charmed me from the first.

—Joshua Slocum, 1900

If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.

—Congolese proverb

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.

—W.B. Yeats, 1937

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

—Leonard Cohen, 1970

No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.

—Woodrow Wilson, 1915

Revolution can never be forecast; it cannot be foretold; it comes of itself. Revolution is brewing and is bound to flare up.

—Vladimir Lenin, 1918