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973 quotes from 439 people

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It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first.
Jonathan Swift1667–1745A Tale of a Tub (1704), Dedication
Ah, son, may you prove luckier than your father, but in all else like him. Then you would not prove base.
Sophocles496–406 BCAjax, Lines 550–551 (tr. R. C. Jebb, 1896)
- Family
- Luck
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
Eugene V. Debs1855–1926Speech in Cleveland, Ohio.(Sept. 11, 1918) Eugene V. Debs Speaks, ed. Jean Y. Tussey (1970)
- Change
- History
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath1932–1963The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 1, Opening line
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936Tremendous Trifles (1909), Ch. XXXI: “The Riddle of the Ivy”
Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
Robert Browning1812–1889“A Death in the Desert”, Dramatis Personae (1864), line 586
- Change
- Hope
When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: “My dear, we live in an age of transition.”
William Ralph Inge1860–1954Assessments and Anticipations (1929), p. 261
- Change
- Comedy
Usually when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
Malcolm X1925–1965Malcolm X Speaks (1965)
- Anger
- Change
I must do something to keep my thoughts fresh and growing. I dread nothing so much as falling into a rut and feeling myself becoming a fossil.
James A. Garfield1831–1881Garfield’s Words (1882)
- Change
Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970The Future of Science (1959), p. 79
There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1841–1935“Natural Law”, 32 Harvard Law Review 40, 41 (1918)
Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; Yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth.
Kahlil Gibran1883–1931Sand and Foam (1926)
It must be obvious… that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.
Alan Watts1915–1973The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)
- Change
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.
Emma Goldman1869–1940“Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap”, a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972) edited by Alix Kates Shulman
- Change
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are. (Weil die Dinge sind, wie sie sind, werden die Dinge nicht so bleiben wie sie sind.)
Bertolt Brecht1898–1956Posthumous publication
- Change