Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.
—Horace Walpole, 1745
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Quotes
My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Despotism subjects a nation to one tyrant, democracy to many.
—Marguerite Gardiner, 1839I’m doomed to die, right? Why should I care if I go to Hades either with gout in my leg or a runner’s grace? Plenty of people will carry me there.
—Nicharchus, c. 90Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
—Saint Augustine, c. 400A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.
—Jane Austen, 1816The life of a sailor is very unhealthy.
—Francis Galton, 1883Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.
—Margaret Mead, 1972Health care delivery is one of the tragedies still in America.
—Jewel Plummer Cobb, 1989Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation.
—Bharati Mukherjee, 1999The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.
—The BibleThe peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms.
—Frantz Fanon, 1961