There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.
—Karl Kraus, 1909Quotes
Mammon, n. The god of the world’s leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1911Punishment is a sort of medicine.
—Aristotle, c. 340 BCMan is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.
—Tertullian, c. 217Don’t ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.
—Colette, 1944Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
—Henry George, 1879He alone who owns the youth gains the future.
—Adolf Hitler, 1935There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.
—Book of Job, c. 600 BCWhat can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains and studying night and day how to fly?
—William Law, 1728The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.
—Myrtle Reed, 1910There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.
—Virginia Woolf, 1927A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851