"It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a German physicist, satirist, and Anglophile. He was the first person in Germany to hold a professorship explicitly dedicated to experimental physics. He is remembered for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modelled on the English bookkeeping term "waste books" or "scrapbooks", and for his discovery of the tree-l
"Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Dont we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes."
"A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense."
"When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so."
"What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment."
"Virtue by premeditation isnt worth much."
"Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer."