The Oddment Emporium

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

—Karl Marx

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor

—Aldous Huxley

What does it matter if I am killed … I have four brothers?

—Prince Edward, The Prince of Wales to Lord Kitchener at the outbreak of war in 1914. (From Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication by Frances Donaldson).

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

—Attributed to SOCRATES by Plato, according to William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277.

(Source: quotationsbook.com)

Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.

—Joseph Conrad - The Secret Sharer (1912).

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

—C S Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952).