B quotes

View Quote In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The... burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent cir****stances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required of all is limited to the period of greatest bodily vigor, and is never excessive; care for one's self and one's family, anxiety as to livelihood, the strain of a ceaseless battle for life—all these influences, which once did so much to wreck the minds and bodies of men and women, are known no more. Certainly, an improvement of the species ought to follow such a change.Insanity, for instance, which in the nineteenth century was so terribly common a product of your insane mode of life, has almost disappeared, with its alternative, suicide.

View Quote Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward, 2000-1887, Ch. 21,(1888)

View Quote Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.

View Quote Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906).

View Quote Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

View Quote Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906).

View Quote Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

View Quote Ray Bradbury, The Meadow (1947), originally a radio play for the World Security Workshop; later revised into a short-story for the anthology The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953).

View Quote I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.

View Quote Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953).

View Quote Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

View Quote Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in United States Congress, House (1973), Energy reorganization act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session, on H.R. 11510. p. 248