I am convinced that there can be no regeneration of mankind until laughter is put down.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyRulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, - a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyForget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild throโ the spiritโs gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyAt the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God's own heart?
Percy Bysshe Shelley