Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 4, “The Scientist as Hero” (p. 199)
“To man the earth seems altogether
No more a mother, but a step-dame rather.”
First Week, Third Day. Compare: "It is far from easy to determine whether she [Nature] has proved to him a kind parent or a merciless stepmother" Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book vii, Section 1.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)
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No more a mother, but a step-dame rather." by Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas?
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas 48
French writer 1544–1590Related quotes
Robert G. Ingersoll
(1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
XVIII. 130–131 (tr. Robert Fagles). Cf. Iliad, XVII. 446–447.
Samuel Butler's translation:
: Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth.
Robert Fitzgerald's translation:
: Of mortal creatures, all that breathe and move,
earth bears none frailer than mankind.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
Variant: Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
Source: The Iliad
“Sometimes a day is a step mother, sometimes a mother.”
Hesiod
book
Works and Days
Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 825.
Buckminster Fuller
(1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
“The more women there are about, the softer a wise man steps.”
Robert Jordan
(1948–2007) American writer
Arad Doman saying
(15 October 1993)
John Cheever
(1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer
Accepting National Book Award, The Writer (September 1958).
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
(1784–1865) British politician
Letter to Richard Cobden (8 January 1862), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 590.
1860s
Context: It would be very delightful if your Utopia could be realized and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce, and would give up quarrelling and fighting altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal; and that this is human nature is proved by the fact that republics, where the masses govern are far more quarrelsome, and more addicted to fighting, than monarchies, which are governed by comparatively few persons.
