“People have to become really bad before they care for nothing but mischief, and delight in it.”
Maxims and Reflections (1833)
Original: (de) Wenn die Menschen recht schlecht werden, haben sie keinen Anteil mehr als die Schadenfreude.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 185
German writer, artist, and politician 1749–1832Related quotes

"On the Uses of a Landed Gentry" address in Edinburgh (6 November 1876), published in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Vol. III (1893), p. 406
Context: The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian government has been called despotism tempered with assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination.
Unfortunately the wrong man was generally assassinated. The true criminal was an absentee, and his agent was shot instead of him. A noble lord living in England, two of whose agents had lost their lives already in his service, ordered the next to post a notice in his Barony that he intended to persevere in what he was doing, and if the tenants thought they would intimidate him by shooting his agents, they would find themselves mistaken.

“For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture.”
Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid adquiritur, nihil est agri cultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius.
Book I, section 42. Translation by Cyrus R. Edmonds (1873), p. 73
De Officiis – On Duties (44 BC)

“When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.”
Book XV, Ch. 2
The History of Tom Jones (1749)

Jimmy Page, quoted in [Paul, Du Noyer, 2003, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music, 1st, Flame Tree Publishing, Fulham, London, 175, ISBN 1-904041-96-5]
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“Nothing is really good or bad in itself — it’s all what a person thinks about it.”
“Wasn't a bad party really
Except for the people”
"Aren't We All", from The Mersey Sound (1967)