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For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

— Samuel Butler Erewhon (1872)

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Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

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Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking pains.

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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

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Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

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The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Samuel Butler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.