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Quotes

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1903

But look, our seas are what we make of them, full of fish or not, opaque or transparent, red or black, high or smooth, narrow or bankless—and we are ourselves sea, sand, coral, seaweed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves.

—Hélène Cixous, 1976

The sick man is the parasite of society.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889

Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began.

—Emma Goldman, 1910

Most vegetarians I ever saw looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals.

—Finley Peter Dunne, 1900

No one wins a quarrel by quarreling.

—German proverb

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

—H.G. Wells, 1920

I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”

—Michel Serres, 1982

The less a man knows about the past and the present, the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.

—Sigmund Freud, 1927

Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833

There is no blindness more insidious, more fatal, than this race for profit.

—Helen Keller, 1928

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887