If 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, 1625
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Quotes
I 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, 1955Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
—Oscar Wilde, 1895No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
—Bertrand Russell, 1961As to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of omnipotence, which is not of humankind and understandable, and so the springs of its behavior are hidden.
—H.M. Tomlinson, 1912I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.
—Groucho Marx, 1959Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities.
—John Lothrop Motley, 1858Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.
—Florence King, 1989What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971The worship of opinion is, at this day, the established religion of the United States.
—Harriet Martineau, 1839The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747I began revolution with eighty-two men. If I had to do it again, I do it with ten or fifteen and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.
—Fidel Castro, 1959
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1962