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Quotes

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words it is war minus the shooting.

—George Orwell, 1945

See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.

—Robert Burton, c. 1620

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1861

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practice charity.

—Albert Camus, 1956

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

—Dorothy Parker

In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

—Anaïs Nin, 1933

Every thought is, strictly speaking, an afterthought.

—Hannah Arendt, 1978

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.

—Benito Mussolini, 1929

Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

—Isadora Duncan, c. 1902