Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you.
—François Rabelais, 1535
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Quotes
I am no courtesan, nor moderator, nor tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.
—Maximilien Robespierre, 1792Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.
—Wendell Phillips, 1859God is making commerce his missionary.
—Joseph Cook, c. 1877What is death? A scary mask. Take it off—see, it doesn’t bite.
—Epictetus, c. 110A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.
—Karl Kraus, 1909I will never again command an army in America if we must carry along paid spies. I will banish myself to some foreign country first.
—William Tecumseh Sherman, 1863Seamen are the nearest to death and the furthest from God.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.
—Dora Russell, 1983It is easy to distinguish between the joking that reflects good breeding and that which is coarse—the one, if aired at an apposite moment of mental relaxation, is becoming in the most serious of men, whereas the other is unworthy of any free person, if the content is indecent or the expression obscene.
—Cicero, c. 44 BCDo not ask me to be kind; just ask me to act as though I were.
—Jules Renard, 1898Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BCA monument is money wasted. My memory will live on if my life has deserved it.
—Pliny the Younger, c. 109