1856 · Skopia

Showing 20 works across all media from 1856

Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

1856

★ 6.9

Nonfiction · History

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution

Alexis de Tocqueville

1856 · 307 pages

Revolutions come not when oppression is worst but when it begins to lift. Tocqueville digs through the old monarchy's records and finds the Revolution completing the centralized state it believed it was destroying.

★ 6.8

Master and Man and Other Stories

1856 · 293 pages

A merchant drives into a blizzard to close a cheap land deal, dragging the servant he underpays. The stories around it, of angels and pilgrims and soldiers, ask what a life is for.

★ 6.6

Speech · Political speech

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

Abraham Lincoln

1856

★ 5.5

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

John Greenleaf Whittier

Maud Muller · 1856

★ 5.2

Do get all on fire and be as cross as you please.

Susan B. Anthony

1856

★ 3.9

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, & horridly cruel works of nature!

1856

★ 3.8

Casting aspersions on those we love always does something to loosen our ties. We shouldn't maltreat our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary · 1856

★ 3.8

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary · 1856

★ 3.8

Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary · 1856

★ 3.7

Historical literature · Political literature

It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution... The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 3.6

Historical literature · Political literature

Despots themselves do not deny that freedom is excellent; only they desire it for themselves alone, and they maintain that everyone else is altogether unworthy of it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 3.6

For say a foolish thing enough… ... The same thing Shall pass at last for absolutely wise, And not with fools exclusively.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

1856

★ 3.6

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Modern Painters · 1856

★ 3.6

Political literature

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

1856

★ 3.5

He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary · 1856

★ 2.1

Personal journal

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry David Thoreau

1856

★ 2.1

Historical literature · Political literature

Freedom alone substitutes from time to time for the love of material comfort more powerful and more lofty passions; it alone supplies ambition with greater objectives than the acquisition of riches, and creates the light that makes it possible to see and to judge the vices and virtues of mankind.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 1.9

Historical literature · Political literature

The French Revolution operated in reference to this world in exactly the same manner as religious revolutions acted in view of the other world. It considered the citizen as an abstract proposition apart from any particular society, in the same way as religions considered man as man, independent of country and time.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The Ancien Regime and the Revolution · 1856

★ 1.9

Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below.

Czar Alexander II of Russia

1856

★ 1.9