Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.
—Book of Job, c. 600 BC
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Quotes
The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125If you steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little.
—Mobutu Sese Seko, 1991The play is the tragedy “Man,” And its hero the conqueror worm.
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1843Kings and fools know no law.
—German proverbOil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.
—Peter Hitchcock, 2010A 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. 100In tampering with the earth, we tamper with a mystery.
—Jonathan Schell, 2000When the root lives on, the new leaves come back.
—Aeschylus, c. 458 BCThe civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of his feet.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841There 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, 1763Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
—Veronica Wedgwood, 1946Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.