Famous quotes containing the words von, place, date and/or birth:
“For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“It is fair to assume that when women in the past have achieved even a second or third place in the ranks of genius they have shown far more native ability than men have needed to reach the same eminence. Not excused from the more general duties that constitute the cement of society, most women of talent have had but one hand free with which to work out their ideal conceptions.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy tale nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)