“We should know what is true before we break our rage.” 

“Every medicine is vain.” 

“Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax.” 

“Bethink thee of the adage, 'Call none blest, till peaceful death have crowned a life of weal.” 

“You are young and young your rule and you think that the tower in which you live is free from sorrow: from it have I not seen two tyrants thrown? The third, who now is king, I shall yet live to see him fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored.” 

“Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.” 

“Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out; and that is far the most unhappy thing of all. 

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.” 

“I beg you, alight and join your sorrow with mine: misfortune wanders everywhere, and settles now upon one and now upon another.” 

“Pour everything out for the blood you have shed, you're wasting your time in appeasing the dead.” 

“You have used me strangely.” 

“I take my cue from deeds, not words.” 

“[Hermes addresses Prometheus :] To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day--to you, thief of fire, I speak.” 

“And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.

“We spoil ourselves with scruples long as things go well.” 

“In visions of the night, like dropping rain, 

“There is no avoidance in delay.” 

“I know how men in exile feed on dreams” 

“To learn is to be young, however old.” 

“Tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” 

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” 

“We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".” 

“It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it. ” 

“It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed.”