Quotes of famous people

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Barack Obama1158

44th President of the United States of America 1961

Oscar Wilde812

Irish writer and poet 1854–1900

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“One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.”

Rita Mae Brown (1944) Novelist, poet, screenwriter, activist

“Here I still flow in God as a small stream of time,
There I shall be a sea of blessedness sublime”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

“I love those who can smile in trouble…”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

“How man has come to be the complex being that he is and why, are questions that neither Science nor Religion makes conclusive answer to. This immortal thinker having such vast powers and possibilities, all his because of his intimate connection with every secret part of Nature from which he has been built up, stands at the top of an immense and silent evolution. He asks why Nature exists, what the drama of life has for its aim, how that aim may be attained….”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 8, Of Reincarnation

“I was filled with determination, to do my best to expose and destroy what i then knew to be a legalized infamy, responsible for a vast destruction of human life.”

Edmund Dene Morel (1873–1924) British politician (1873-1924)

King Leopold's ghost. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/kingleopoldsghost History of the CRA, 1904, FF.

“All wars are civil ones; for it is still man spilling his own blood, tearing out his own bowels.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Toutes les guerres sont civiles; car c'est toujours l'homme contre l'homme qui répand son propre sang, qui déchire ses propres entrailles.
Dialogues des morts, ch. 17, cited from De l'éducation des filles, Dialogues des morts et opuscules divers (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1857) p. 149; translation from Mr. Elphingston (trans.) Dialogues of the Dead, Together with Some Fable Composed for the Education of a Prince (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1754) vol. 1, p. 87. (1700).

“I expect a judgment. Shortly.”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 3

“He wos wery good to me, he wos!”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 11

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

A literatura é a maneira mais agradável de ignorar a vida.
Variant: To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
Source: The Book of Disquietude, trans. Richard Zenith, text 116

“I don't know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines. I would recommend to drop disciplinarity wherever one can. Disciplines are an outgrowth of academia. In academia you appoint somebody and then in order to give him a name he must be a historian, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a biophysicist; he has to have a name. Here is a human being: Joe Smith -- he suddenly has a label around the neck: biophysicist. Now he has to live up to that label and push away everything that is not biophysics; otherwise people will doubt that he is a biophysicist. If he's talking to somebody about astronomy, they will say "I don't know, you are not talking about your area of competence, you're talking about astronomy, and there is the department of astronomy, those are the people over there," and things of that sort. Disciplines are an aftereffect of the institutional situation.”

Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002) Austrian American scientist and cybernetician

Von Foerster (1995) " Interview Heinz von Foerster http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/interviewvonf.html" S. Franchi, G. Güzeldere, and E. Minch (eds) in: Constructions of the Mind Volume 4, issue 2. 26 June 1995 <br class="br">1990s

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

“Angry people are not always wise.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“When I fall in love, it will be forever.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Source: Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay

“No doubt: I was in front of a madman. The awareness that the existence of our people was in the hands of an insane person, unable to dominate the situation […] weighed on me with all its strength.”

Dietrich von Choltitz (1894–1966) German general

About Adolf Hitler.

“I am getting nowhere with you and I can't let you go and I cant get through.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about these things. What (women) like is to be a man’s last romance.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

No known source in Oscar Wilde's works. Earliest known example of a similar quote comes from a 2001 usenet post https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.atheism/ZadPWBw-wew/G_3tx370wpoJ (not attributed to Wilde) <br class="br">Attributed to Wilde on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/15736-i-don-t-want-to-go-to-heaven-none-of-my?page=83 some time on or before January 2008. <br class="br">Bears some resemblance to Machiavelli's deathbed dream https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli#Disputed. <br class="br">Disputed

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan

Lord Darlington, Act III
Source: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)