Authors Quotes
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There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
Hannah Arendt
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The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen.
Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did.
We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it.
There could never have been a Matthew Arnold. Or any of the Victorian poets. Or any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer.
We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt. And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach.
To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelangelos, and Mozarts in their places, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse.
But they would have been incalculably different.
Bart Ehrman
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The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
Isaac Newton
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The authors of great evils know best how to remove them.
Plutarch
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Few authors are so interesting as their work - they generally reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books.
Alec-Tweedie
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We have not been impressed with any attribute of the Senate other than its appearance and manners. We have heard the best speakers: they all fire off speeches which deal with the entire subject in general terms and which do not attempt to debate, to answer opponents' arguments or offer new points for discussion. And the speeches are constantly degenerating into empty rhetoric; they abound in quotations from well-known authors or from their own former speeches.
Beatrice Webb
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Over against the devil and his missionaries, the authors of false doctrines and sects, we ought to be like the Apostle, impatient, and rigorously condemnatory, as parents are with the dog that bites their little one, but the weeping child itself they soothe.
Martin Luther
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And for the citation of so many authors, 'tis the easiest thing in nature. Find out one of these books with an alphabetical index, and without any farther ceremony, remove it verbatim into your own... there are fools enough to be thus drawn into an opinion of the work; at least, such a flourishing train of attendants will give your book a fashionable air, and recommend it for sale.
Miguel de Cervantes
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...I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage. If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!
Arthur Rimbaud
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The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
Albert Camus