"I think perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to read aloud Gibbon to me in the evenings, because if it’s nice and hot by the fire, there’s something about Gibbon that does, rather, make you go to sleep."

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“Words had become to him a means of obscuring facts — not of revealing them. He was an adept in the art of the useful phrase — that is to say the phrase that falls soothingly on the ear and is quite empty of meaning.”

“The rottenness comes from within.”

“It would be difficult Bland thought, to forget Hercule Poirot, and this not entirely for complimentary reasons.”

“Ah, my friend, one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort.”

“We had three servants, which was a minimum then.”

“‘I have often noticed that being a devoted wife saps the intellect,’ murmured Tommy.”

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"We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, whe…"

— Valentino Braitenberg

Literature1926–2011

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"Why shouldn’t I eat toothpaste? It’s a free world. Why shouldn’t I chew my toenails? i happen to have trodden in some honey. Why shouldn’t I prance across central park with delicate sideways leaps? I …"

— Derek Parfit

Ethics1942–2017

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"Some years ago, it was customary for fast-talking confidence men to find some chump with five or ten thousand dollars in cash and sell him the Brooklyn Bridge or the Holland Tunnel. And I hear that wh…"

— Revilo P. Oliver

Education1908–1994

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"But it is better to assume principles less in number and finite, as Empedocles makes them to be. All philosophers... make principles to be contraries... as those who introduce as principles the rare a…"

— Aristotle

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