Susan is lean, cadaverous and intellectual, with the proportions of a file and the voice of a hurdy-gurdy.
Anonymous writer in the New York World (1866) on Susan Bronwell Anthony (1820-1906), American feminist |
The arch-philistine Jeremy Bentham was the insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century.
Karl Marx (1818-83) on Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), British political philospher |
The bear loves licks and forms her young, but bears are not philosophers.
Edmund Burke (1729-97) on Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) |
The Lord strike him with madness and blindness. May the heavens empty upon him thunderbolts and the wrath of the Omnipotent burn itself unto him in the present and future world. May the Universe light against him and the earth open to swallow him up.
Pope Clement VI (1478-1534) on a now anonymous subject |
The next time anyone asks you 'What is Bertrand Russell's Philosophy?' the correct answer is 'What year please?'
Sydney Hook on Bertrand Russell |
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), History of England |
The truth is that Sydney Smith is naturally coarse, and a lover of scurrilous language.
John Ward, Earl of Dudley (1781-1833) on Revd Sydney Smith |
Voltaire, or the anti-poet - the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) on Voltaire (1694-1778) |
What a hideous, odd-looking man Sydney Smith is! With a mouth like an oyster, and three double chins.
Mrs Brookfield on the Revd Sydney Smith (1771-1845) |
You get the impression this is another dirty wop, an organ grinder.
W. H. Auden (1907-73) on Pope Pius XII (1875-1958) |
