Fischio Orecchio Quotes & Sayings

[I]t's necessary to exert very great foresight every time you go to blame or praise a man, so that you won't speak incorrectly ... For you shouldn't suppose that, while stones are sacred and pieces of wood, and birds, and snakes, human beings are not. Rather of all these things, the most sacred is the good human being, while the most polluted is the wicked.
Speech attributed to Socrates in Plato, Minos 319a, trans. Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 63. — Plato

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words. — W. H. Auden

I can say that we are very clear in our mind about the responsibility of the national soldiers for the break with civilisation that was the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that this is something that will have to be handed over to generations to come ... so we don't see any reason to change our view of history. — Angela Merkel

It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site, gathering up the shrapnel, to figure out what kind of an explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do and how close it came to actually achieving that. — Neil Gaiman

Hell, rationality itself - the exalted Human ability to reason - hadn't evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. — Peter Watts

We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don't make us weak. They're the source of our strength. — Jimmy Carter

The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled. — John Keats

Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate," said Elphaba. "See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something? — Gregory Maguire