About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
—Josh Billings
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
—Anatole France
A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself.
—Henry Morgan
I studiously avoided all so-called holy men. I did so because I had to make do with my own truth, not accept from others what I could not attain on my own. I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe can I make any borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself — out of what my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.
—Carl Jung
Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse, it is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.
—Virginia Woolf
The first person you fell in love with stole your heart. The first person you made love with stole your soul. And if these were one and the same, you were doomed.
—Jodi Picoult in Mercy
Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.
—Lionel Trilling
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked for forgiveness.
—Emo Philips
It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond this one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, . . . or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgment to decide who exactly is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit.
—Abbie Hoffman
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
—Igor Stravinsky
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
—Joseph Conrad