“Oh my lord Ajax, of all human ills
Greatest is fortune’s wayward tyranny.
Of a free father was I born the child,
One rich and great as any Phrygian else.
Now am I a slave; for so the gods, or rather
Thy warrior’s hand, would have it.”
Tecmessa in Ajax by Sophocles
“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson