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Quotes

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.

—Book of Job, c. 600 BC

The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.

—Juvenal, c. 125

If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little.

—Mobutu Sese Seko, 1991

The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.

—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843

Kings and fools know no law.

—German proverb

Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.

—Peter Hitchcock, 2010

A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

—Tacitus, c. 100

In tampering with the earth, we tamper with a mystery.

—Jonathan Schell, 2000

When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.

—Aeschylus, c. 458 BC

The civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself. 

—Samuel Johnson, 1763

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946

Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, 1913