Daniel Defoe Quotes
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Pride the first peer and president of hell.
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The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
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In trouble to be troubled, Is to have your trouble doubled.
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Nature has left this tincture in the blood, That all men would be tyrants if they could.
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Necessity makes an honest man a knave.
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'Tis no sin to cheat the devil.
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An Englishman will fairly drink as much As will maintain two families of Dutch.
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All our discontents about what we want appeared to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.
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It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
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'Tis very strange Men should be so fond of being thought wickeder than they are.
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I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.
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All men would be tyrants if they could.
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As covetousness is the root of all evil, so poverty is the worst of all snares.
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He that is rich is wise.
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Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.
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He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters.
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Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.
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The best of men cannot suspend their fate: The good die early, and the bad die late.
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Great families of yesterday we show,And lords whose parents were the Lord knows who.
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When kings the sword of justice first lay down,They are no kings, though they possess the crown.Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things,The good of subjects is the end of kings.
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Reason, it is true, is DICTATOR in the Society of Mankind; from her there ought to lie no Appeal; But here we want a Pope in our Philosophy, to be the infallible Judge of what is or is not Reason.
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We never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.
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From this amphibious ill-born mob beganThat vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
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In their religion they are so uneven,That each man goes his own byway to heaven.