Quotes about men
page 3

“I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

“A commitment to sexual equality with men is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

"I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape" http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html (1983). <br class="br">Context: I want to see this men's movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don't make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can't be self-indulgent.

“Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.”

Lois Wyse (1926–2007) American advertising executive

For women, Women

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Poem, "Liberty's old story" in Pansies (Third typing, ribbon copy - 231 poems, c. 11-28 February 1929)

Fight, Fools, Children

“Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.”

Oscar Wilde book The Nightingale and the Rose

Source: The Nightingale and the Rose

Life, Secret, Reading, Dependency

“Men may the wise atrenne, and naught atrede.”

Geoffrey Chaucer book Troilus and Criseyde

Source: Troilus and Criseyde

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider

“This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Feeling

“In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book The Social Contract

Source: The Social Contract

Truth, Law

“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Books, Reading, Past

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859)

Strong

“All men by nature desire knowledge.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

Source: On Man in the Universe

Nature, Knowledge

“What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?”

Albert Camus book Reflections on the Guillotine

Reflections on the Guillotine (1957)

Madness

“Apparently, women need to feel loved to have sex, and men need to have sex to feel loved, so the basic act of continuing the species requires a lie from one of you.”

Billy Connolly (1942) British comedian

An Audience With Billy - 1985

Love, Women, Lie, Sex

“Omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of 'free-will' … doubtless it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace”

Martin Luther book On the Bondage of the Will

Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 217

God, Health, Age, Nature

“…racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate in man. It is the product of ideologies. But even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed, it would not render social cooperation futile and would not invalidate Ricardo's theory of association. Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.”

Ludwig von Mises book Human Action

Part 2, VIII.84
Human Action (1949)

Love, People, Peace, Nature

“Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Women, World

“When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

Good Sense without God, or, Freethoughts Opposed to Supernatural Ideas (London: W. Stewart & Co., ca. 1900) ( Project Gutenberg e-text http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/gsens10.txt), preface <br class="br">Translator unknown. Original publication in French at Amsterdam, 1772, as Le bon sens ("Common Sense"), and often attributed to John Meslier.

Truth, Sense

“Esaias says: “The wolf also shall feed with the lamb, and the leopard shall take his rest with the kid; the calf also, and the bull, and the lion shall eat together; and a little boy shall lead them. …” I am quite aware that some persons endeavour to refer these words to the case of savage men, both of different nations and various habits, who come to believe, and when they have believed, act in harmony with the righteous. But although this is [true] now with regard to some men coming from various nations to the harmony of the faith, nevertheless in the resurrection of the just [the words shall also apply] to those animals mentioned. For God is rich in all things. And it is right that when the creation is restored, all the animals should … revert to the food originally given by God … that is, the productions of the earth.”

Irenaeus (130–202) Bishop and saint

Book 5, Chapter 33, Section 4. Translated by Philip Schaff et al. (full text at Wikisource).
Against Heresies

God, Faith, Food, Boy

“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Not Disraeli but La Rochefoucauld; it is Maxim 308 in his Reflections.
Misattributed

People

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) French clergyman, noble and statesman

Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
As quoted in The Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1896) by Jehiel K̀eeler Hoyt, p. 763
Édouard Fournier, in L'Espirit dans l'Historie (1867), 3rd edition, Ch. 51, p. 260, disputes the traditional attribution, and suggests various agents of Richelieu might have been the actual author.
David Hackett Fischer, in Champlain's Dream (2009), Simon & Schuster, p. 704, n. 14, says it's a paraphrase of Quintilian and there is no source closer to Richelieu than Francoise Bertaut's Memoires pour servir à l'histoire d'Anne d'Autriche.
Disputed

“It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Nature

“Without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.”

Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961) Congolese Prime Minister, cold war leader, executed

Letter to his wife (Congo, My Country)

Justice

“Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses.”

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) Italian criminologist

Die Welt (1909); also in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations (1985) by Joseph L. Baron.

“There are three classes of friendship and enmity, since men are so disposed to one another either by preference or by need or through pleasure and pain.”

Ptolemy (100–170) Greco-Egyptian writer and astronomer of Alexandria

Book IV, sec. 7
Tetrabiblos

Pain, Friendship, Pleasure

“Whatever people do in the market economy, is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner's own plan for the plans of his fellow-men. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute pre-eminence of his own plan.”

Ludwig von Mises book Socialism

Socialism (1922), Epilogue (1947)

People, Sense

“We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

1937 interview reported by Joel A. Rogers, "Marcus Garvey," in Negroes of New York series, New York Writers Program, 1939, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

Children, Training

“Since the number of men is large but the earthly realm is not inexhaustible, one man can no longer profit from the labour of twenty. Moderation, contentment, and frugality must become the general morals of mankind. […] The whole earth becomes a garden, and nature has at last completed her day’s work here below, bringing permanent enlightenment, peace, and felicity together with the greatest possible number of men : she has anointed every man as his own judge, priest, and king; has turned the often-ridiculed tale of the golden age, mankind’s favorite idea of old, into a reality by discreetly removing the eternal inequality of wealth, which has been ineffectively combated by all lawgivers and has always has crept back in, and which is the source of the decay of all nations, and the root of servitude, tyranny, and disunity among men, of venality and moral corruption, making it forever impossible through the excessive growth of the human population.”

Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830) German philosopher and founder of the Order of Illuminati

Philosophy degree (1783), in: The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Rituals and Doctrinces of the Illuminati, ed. by Josef Wäges and Reinhard Markner, Lewis Masonic 2015, p. 364.

Age, Peace, Idea, Nature

“When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.”

Erik H. Erikson (1902–1994) American German-born psychoanalyst & essayist

"The Problem of Ego Identity" (1956), published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4:56-121

War, Question

“They [men] have corrupted this [God's supernatural] order by making profane things what they should make of holy things, because in fact, we believe scarcely any thing except which pleases us.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

The Art of Persuasion

God

“Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Crito
Plato, Crito

God, Understanding, Country

“Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep…. he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 29

People, Sleep, Housing, Cry

“Less hate and greed
Is what we need
And more of service true;
More men to love
The flag above
And keep it first in view.Less boast and brag
About the flag,
More faith in what it means;
More heads erect,
More self-respect,
Less talk of war machines.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: A Heap o' Livin' (1916), Our Duty to Our Flag, stanzas 1-2, p. 59.

Love, Hate, War, Faith

“What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them?
But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Truth, World, Faith, Beauty

“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

Jean Rostand (1894–1977) French writer

See also "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." (misattributed to Joseph Stalin)

God

“On Saturday night, I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning when I was playing organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday they'd be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man's carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scoured by any white-light religion.”

Anton LaVey book The Satanic Bible

As quoted in the Introduction by Burton H. Wolfe
The Satanic Bible (1969)

God, Children, Religion, Girl

“To tell the story of how and why we chose to do what we did, no one can ignore the personalities and characteristics of those individuals engaged in making decisions. For military command is as much a practice of human relations as it is a science of tactics and a knowledge of logistics. Where there are people, there is pride and ambition, prejudice and conflict. In generals, as in all other men, capabilities cannot always obscure weaknesses, nor can talents hide faults.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. x.

People, Knowledge, Decision, Science

“What women want is what men want. They want respect.”

Marilyn vos Savant (1946) US American magazine columnist, author and lecturer

As quoted in Evergreen : A Guide to Writing with Readings (2003), by Susan Fawcett

Women

“For the gospel proclaims that God is with us now, actively fighting the forces which would make man captive. And it is the task of theology and the Church to know where God is at work so that we can join him in this fight against evil. In America we know where the evil is. We know that men are shot and lynched. We know that men are crammed into ghettos…. There is a constant battle between Christ and Satan, and it is going on now. If we make this message contemporaneous with our own life situation, what does Christ's defeat of Satan mean for us?… The demonic forces of racism are real for the black man. Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man "the devil." The white structure of this American society, personified in every racist, must be at least part of what the New Testament meant by the demonic forces.”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), pp. 39-41

Life, God, Evil, Christ

“There is no man, let him be aware of it or not, who is not a combatant in this hot contest; no one who does not take an active part in the responsibility of the defeat or victory. The prisoner in his chains and the king on his throne, the poor and the rich, the healthy and the infirm, the wise and the ignorant, the captive and the free, the old man and the child, the civilized and the savage, share equally in the combat. Every word that is pronounced, is either inspired by God or by the world, and necessarily proclaims, implicitly or explicitly, but always clearly, the glory of the one or the triumph of the other. In this singular warfare we all fight through forced enlistment; here the system of substitutes or volunteers finds no place. In it is unknown the exception of sex or age; here no attention is paid to him who says, I am the son of a poor widow; nor to the mother of the paralytic, nor to the wife of the cripple. In this warfare all men born of woman are soldiers.
And don’t tell me you don’t wish to fight; for the moment you tell me that, you are already fighting; nor that you don’t know which side to join, for while you are saying that, you have already joined a side; nor that you wish to remain neutral; for while you are thinking to be so, you are so no longer; nor that you want to be indifferent; for I will laugh at you, because on pronouncing that word you have chosen your party. Don’t tire yourself in seeking a place of security against the chances of war, for you tire yourself in vain; that war is extended as far as space, and prolonged through all time. In eternity alone, the country of the just, can you find rest, because there alone there is no combat. But do not imagine, however, that the gates of eternity shall be opened for you, unless you first show the wounds you bear; those gates are only opened for those who gloriously fought here the battles of the Lord, and were, like the Lord, crucified.”

Juan Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) Spanish author, political theorist and diplomat

Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)

God, War, Age, World

“And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more severe with you, and you will be more offended at them. For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censoring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and the noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

39c–d
Plato, Apology

Death, Way, Thinking

“Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert.”

Gilbert Parker (1862–1932) Canadian novelist and British politician

"The White Omen"

Love, Star

“The brave man is not only he who overcomes the enemy, but he who is stronger than pleasures. Some men are masters of cities, but are enslaved to women.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 163
Variant: The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures. There are some men who are masters of cities but slaves to women.

Women, Pleasure

“The Word of God can take care of itself, and will do so if we preach it, and cease defending it. See you that lion. They have caged him for his preservation; shut him up behind iron bars to secure him from his foes! See how a band of armed men have gathered together to protect the lion. What a clatter they make with their swords and spears! These mighty men are intent upon defending a lion. O fools, and slow of heart! Open that door! Let the lord of the forest come forth free. Who will dare to encounter him? What does he want with your guardian care? Let the pure gospel go forth in all its lion-like majesty, and it will soon clear its own way and ease itself of its adversaries.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

The Lover of God's Law Filled with Peace (January 1888) http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols34-36/chs2004.pdf

God, Fools, Way, Heart

“Dear rulers … I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. … If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

letter to the German rulers (1524), as quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896

War, Children, People, School

“Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

http://books.google.com/books?id=feWS3EhzaRwC&q=%22Most+men+think+they+are+immortal+until+they+get+a+cold+when+they+think+they+are+going+to+die+within+the+hour%22&pg=PA216#v=onepage
Human Options (1981)

Thinking

“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Review of The Freedom of the Streets by Jack Common, June 1938, pp. 335-6

“Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.”

B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) American behaviorist

Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65.

Happiness

“God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. Those who plot impossible upheavals among us, are either young and do not know our people, or are hard-hearted men who do not care a straw either about their own lives or those of others.”

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) Russian poet

Found in Pushkin's. The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories. English edition by Random House LLC. 2013. p. 139
As quoted by Joseph Frank in Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009). Princeton University Press, p. 203.

God, People, Heart

“On that day all the gods looked down from heaven upon the ship and the might of the heroes, half-divine, the bravest of men then sailing the sea.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book I. Preparation and Departure, Lines 547–549 (tr. R. C. Seaton)

God, Sea

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

George Orwell book Inside the Whale and Other Essays

"Charles Dickens" (1939), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940) http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd <br class="br">Charles Dickens (1939)

“The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don't, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it — they felt this as never before and were filled with bitter rage when, in the dark of the early morning, they saw the brightly lit windows and knew that those glowing gold curtains gave shelter and freedom to hundreds of thousands of people, men with women they desired, while they themselves were homeless, plodding blindly through the streets, through the rain; it was cruel as only the sea could be cruel — the sea in which a person can die of thirst.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Women, Money, People, Freedom

“Now, since on God's own testimony, men are 'flesh', they can savour of nothing but the flesh; therefore 'free-will can avail only to sin. And if, while the Spirit of God is calling and teaching among them, they go from bad to worse, what could they do when left to themselves, without the Spirit of God? Your [Erasmus] observation that Moses is speaking of the men of that age is not to the point at all. The same is true of all men, for all are 'flesh'; as Christ says, 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh' (John 3:6) How grave a defect this is, He Himself there teaches, when he says: 'Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God (v. 5)…I call a man ungodly if he is without the Spirit of God; for Scripture says that the Spirit is given to justify the ungodly. As Christ distinguished the Spirit from the flesh, saying: "that which is born of the flesh is flesh', and adds that which is born of the flesh cannot enter the kingdom of God', it obviously follows that whatever is flesh is ungodly, under God's wrath, and a stranger to His kingdom. And if it is a stranger to God's kingdom and Spirit, it follows of necessity that it is under the kingdom and spirit of Satan. For there is no middle kingdom between the kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan, which are ever at war with each other.”

Martin Luther book On the Bondage of the Will

Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 241, 253

God, War, Age, Christ

“His Mohammed, as has been said, commands that ruling is to be done by the sword, and in his Koran the sword is the commonest and noblest work. Thus the Turk is, in truth, nothing but a murderer or highwayman, as his deeds show before men’s eyes.”

Martin Luther book On War against the Turk

On War against the Turk (1529)

Truth

“Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

"Letter to a Cuban Farmer" (1893)

Love, Hate

“But the Jews are so hardened that they listen to nothing; though overcome by testimonies they yield not an inch. It is a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on guard against them.”

Martin Luther book Table Talk

863
Table Talk (1569)

“The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

Women, Truth, Religion

“Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Dr. Theodore Canisius (17 May 1859)
1850s

Understanding

“Q: People think you are very hostile to men.
A: I am.
Q: Doesn't that worry you?
A: From what you said, it worries them.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Nervous Interview http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIA.html (1979). Dworkin wrote both the questions and the answers

Hostility, People, Thinking

“God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

God, Solitude, Evil, Cheating

“The use of men is like a leaf
On bough, which goeth and another cometh.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XXVI, lines 137–138 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

“A great wind came forth, the clouds rose on high.
Now that my might rules all within the seas, I have returned to my old village.
Where will I find brave men to guard the four corners of my land?”

Emperor Gaozu of Han (-256–-195 BC) founding emperor of the Han Dynasty (256 BC - 195 BC)

Translated by Burton Watson
大風歌 Song of the Great Wind

Sea

“Let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth—in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes. You, Simmias and Cebes, and all other men, will depart at some time or other. Me already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Fate, Pleasure, Truth

“"It is not a dirty word, "feminism." I just think that women belong in the human population with the same rights as everybody else. … The problem is, "A feminist looks like this, or is like that." We are taught not to like ourselves as women, we are taught what we're supposed to look like, what our measurements are supposed to be. I never hear what measurements men are supposed to be. Just women."”

Cyndi Lauper (1953) American singer, songwriter, actress and activist

Interview with Matthew Rettenmund in his book "Totally Awesome 80's" (1996), p. 149-150

Women, Problem, Thinking

“This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.”

Mikhail Bakunin book God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

Love, God, Justice, Way

“Concerning the female sorcerer. Roman law also prescribes this. Why does the law name women more than men here, even though men are also guilty of this? Because women are more susceptible to those superstitions of Satan; take Eve, for example. They are commonly called “wise women.””

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Let them be killed.
Sermon on Exodus, 1526, WA XVI, p. 551 as quoted in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, (2003), p. 231

Women, Law

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness".
This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the Earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and to be free.
The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: "All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.”

Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) Vietnamese communist leader and first president of Vietnam

Those are undeniable truths.
Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence (2 September 1945), Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works (1960-1962), Vol. 3, pp. 17-21

Life, People, Truth, Birth

“Upon the earth are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent; and in a word, the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them as the air is to us. Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater perfection, in the same degree that air is purer than water or the ether than air. Also they have temples and sacred places in which the gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the sun, moon, and stars as they really are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

God, Disease, Star, Sense

“For the history of the centuries that have passed since the birth of Christ nowhere reveals conditions like those of the present. There has never been such building and planting in the world. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in costliness. Who has ever heard of such commerce as now encircles the earth? There have arisen all kinds of art and sculpture, embroidery and engraving, the like of which has not been seen during the whole Christian era. In addition men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent, Luke 21:25-36 (1522) http://www.trinitylutheranms.org/MartinLuther/MLSermons/mlserms_original.html, as translated in The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (1905) edited by John Nicholas Lenker

World, Art, History, Boy

“It would be better for me… that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Gorgias, 482c
Plato, Gorgias

“Instinct reveals itself as self-concentrating, self-edifying it is limitation. Intuition produces self-denial, self-destruction； it is expansion. Culture can develop both. If it develops instinct, animal nature appears. Then culture destroys the intuitive capacity which men have even found in a primitive state.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 17

Nature, Appearance, Animals

“The "great things" are nothing less than that she became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed upon her as pass man's understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among whom she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in Heaven, and such a child. She herself is unable to find a name for this work, it is too exceedingly great; all she can do is break out in the fervent cry: "They are great things," impossible to describe or define. Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her or to her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees, or grass in the fields, or stars in the sky, or sand by the sea. It needs to be pondered in the heart, what it means to be the Mother of God.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Commentary on the Magnificat (Das Magnificat), A.D. 1521
<cite>Luther's Works</cite>, American Edition, vol. 21, p. 326, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Concordia Publishing House, 1956. ISBN 057006421X

God, Star, Understanding, Tree

“The trouble with trouble was that trouble was looking for Coldwater Gatling. They don't like Texas Rangers down in Arizona, consequently Coldwater Gatling figured shoot first and find out who you killed afterwards. That's how they did it in the Lone Star State where men were men and the women didn't mind cooking for hard-riding straight-shooting people like Coldwater Gatling, the toughest man in leather they had down there.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Women, People, Star, Cooking

“Be more careful in guarding against censure than against danger; for the wicked may well dread the end of life, but good men should dread ignominy during life. Strive by all means to live in security, but if ever it falls to your lot to face the dangers of battle, seek to preserve your life, but with honour and not with disgrace; for death is the sentence which fate has passed on all mankind, but to die nobly is the special honour with nature has reserved for the good.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

Verse 43.
To Demonicus

Life, Death, Fate, Nature

“The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (28 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Hate, War, Education, Family

“Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.”

Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) Russian physiologist

Scientific Study of So-Called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals.

Behavior, Nature

“Seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men.”

Harold II of England (1022–1066) Anglo-Saxon King of England

Variant translation: He will give him seven feet of English ground, or as much more as he may be taller than other men.
Attributed by the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241) in his Saga of Harald Hardrade.
1066, when asked by his traitorous brother, Tostig, how much of England he was prepared to give up to the invading King Harald Hardrada of Norway
Attributed

“The falsest of all philosophies is that which, under the pretext of delivering men from the embarrassment of their passions, counsels idleness and the abandonment and neglect of themselves.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 172.

Passion

“Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

On Mark Twain and Anatole France, in "Mark Twain - The Licensed Jester" in Tribune (26 November 1943); reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968)

Life, Children

“The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.”

Karl Popper book The Open Society and Its Enemies

Vol. 1, Endnotes to the Chapters : Notes to the Introduction.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Intelligence, Decision, Learning

“[S]he became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man's understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a Child…. Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God…. None can say of her nor announce to her greater things, even though he had as many tongues as the earth possesses flowers and blades of grass: the sky, stars; and the sea, grains of sand. It needs to be pondered in the heart what it means to be the Mother of God.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Luther's Works, 21:326, cf. 21:346

God, Star, Flowers, Understanding

“People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.”

Ludwig von Mises book Human Action

Human Action (1949)

Love, People, Peace, Freedom

“All around us there are other women, seemingly not hurt, making small talk, acting normal, which means happy, not discontent, certainly not devastated. Girls are still being socialised not to identify with - feel empathy for - other females: she got hurt because she did x, y, z - I didn’t, so I didn’t get hurt; she’s at fault, I’m not; the punishment fits her crime; blame her, exonerate him. This continuing, culturally applauded socialisation of women not to empathize with other women is a malignant part of the culture of men, dead white ones or not. Women are perceived to be appalling failures when we are sad. Women are pathetic when we are angry. Women are ridiculous when we are militant. Women are unpleasant when we are bitter, no matter what the cause. Women are deranged when women want justice. Women are man-haters when women want accountability and respect from men. Women are trash when women let men do what men want Women are shrews or puritans when we do not.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

‘Suffering and Speech’ in Catherine A MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (eds) In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings.

Women, Sadness, Justice, Feeling

“We shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and a migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the site of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now, if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O friends and judges, can be greater than this? …Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. …What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they would not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

40c–41c
Plato, Apology

Life, Death, World, Dreams

“It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness

"A Woman's Liberation", p. 158; first published in Asimov's (1995)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)

Women, Freedom

“Now there was fought a battle such as men have not seen the like. And the earth was covered with steel, and arrows fell from the clouds like hail, and the ground was torn with hoofs, and blood flowed like water upon the plains. And the dead lay around in masses, and the feet of the horses could not stir because of them.”

Ferdowsi book Shahnameh

Translation of Helen Zimmern http://classics.mit.edu/Ferdowsi/kings.14.defeatafrasiyab.html <br class="br">Shahnameh

Water, Horse, Dead

“The moderation of great men only sets a limit to their vices. The moderation of weak men is mediocrity.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

La modération des grands hommes ne borne que leurs vices. La modération des faibles est médiocrité.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 168.

“An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: What I Saw At Shiloh (1881), V

Death

“We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)

God, Children, People

“You want to have proven to you that the soul is imperishable and immortal, and you think that the philosopher who is confident in death has but a vain and foolish confidence, if he thinks that he will fare better than one who has led another sort of life, in the world below, unless he can prove this; and you say that the strength and divinity of the soul, and of her existence prior to our becoming men, does not necessarily imply her immortality. …For any man, who is not devoid of natural feeling, has reason to fear, if he has no knowledge or proof of the soul's immortality. That is what I suppose you to say, Cebes, which I designedly repeat, in order that nothing may escape us…”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Death, World, Fear

“Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.”

Jean Rostand (1894–1977) French writer

[Jean Rostand, The substance of men, Doubleday, 1962, 19]

Science

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

Quoted in: Keith Stern (2013), Queers in History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals. p. 460

Life, Courage, Nature, Suicide

“But the division of labor is not peculiar to the economic world; we can observe its growing influence in the most varied fields of society. The political, administrative, and judicial functions are growing more and more specialized. It is the same with the aesthetic and scientific functions. It is long since philosophy reigned as the science unique; it has been broken into a multitude of special disciplines each of which has its object, method, and thought. “Men working in the sciences have become increasingly more specialized.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), p. 40

World, Science

“If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 188.

Fear, Soul, Intelligence, Courage

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Sometimes attributed to Lincoln since a 1950 speech of Douglas MacArthur citing him as its author, this is actually from a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Misattributed

Silence

“Balthasar of Waldshit has fallen into prison here - a man not merely irreverent and unlearned, but even empty. Learn the sum of the matter. When he came to Zurich our Council fearing lest he should cause a commotion ordered him to be taken into custody. Since, however, he had once in freakishness of disposition and fatuity, lurked out in Waldshut against our Council, of which place he, by the gods, was a guardian [i. e., he has pastor there], until the stupid fellow disunited and destroyed everything, it was determined that I should discuss with him in a friendly manner the baptising of infants and Catabaptists, as he earnestly begged first from prison and afterwards from custody. I met the fellow and rendered him mute as a fish. The next day he recited a recantation in the presence of certain Councillors appointed for the purpose [which recantation when repeated to the Two Hundred it was ordered should be publicly made Therefore having started to write it in the city, he gave it to the Council with his own hand, with all its silliness, as he promised. At length he denied that he had changed his opinion, although he had done so before a Swiss tribunal, which with us is a capital offence, affirming that his signature had been extorted from him by terror, which was most untrue].
The council was so unwilling that force should be used on him that when the Emperor or Ferdinand twice asked that the fellow be given to him it refused the request. Indeed he was not taken prisoner that he might suffer the penalty of his boldness in the baptismal matter, but to prevent his causing in secret some confusion, a thing he delighted to do. Then he angered the Council; for there were present most upright Councillors who had witnessed his most explicit and unconstrained withdrawal, and had refused to hand to him over to the cruelty of the Emperor, helping themselves with my aid. The next day he was thrust back into prison and tortured. It is clear that the man had become a sport for demons, so he recanted not frankly as he had promised, nay he said that he entertained no other opinions than those taught by me, execrated the error and obstinacy of the Catabaptists, repeated this three times when stretched on the racks, and bewailed his misery and the wrath of God which in this affair was so unkind. Behold what wantonness! Than these men there is nothing more foolhardy, deceptive infamous - for I cannot tell you what they devise in Abtzell - and shameless. Tomorrow or next day the case will come up.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter to Capito, January 1, 1526 (Staehelin, Briefe ausder Reformationseit, p. 20), ibid, p. 249-250

God, Secret, Stupidity, Fear

“In shallow men the fish of little thoughts cause much commotion. In oceanic minds the whales of inspiration make hardly a ruffle.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Fish

“Few men are controlled by reason, and few are pleased by a right purpose. The mob, rather, is led to what was plainly invented for oblivion of its cares. For it supposes that whatever serves its pleasure must also be linked to the happiness of the age. Therefore, let us grant the expenses, and not be forever giving from rational considerations. Sometimes it is useful to play the fool, and so control the joys the people long for.”

Cassiodorus Variae

Bk. 3, no. 51; pp. 70-71.
Variae

People, Pleasure, Age, Fools

“If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science. So the Philosopher argues in chap. 2 of his first book of the work [Metaphisics]. And he immediately indicates what the greatest science is, namely the science which is about those things that are most knowable. But there are two senses in which things are said to be maximally knowable: either [1] because they are the ﬁrst of all things known and without them nothing else can be known; or [2] because they are what are known most certainly. In either way, however, this science is about the most knowable. Therefore, this most of all is a science and, consequently, most desirable…”
sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia". Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.

Duns Scotus (1265–1308) Scottish Franciscan friar, philosopher and Catholic blessed

sic: si omnes homines natura scire desiderant, ergo maxime scientiam maxime desiderabunt. Ita arguit Philosophus I huius cap. 2. Et ibidem subdit: "quae sit maxime scientia, illa scilicet quae est circa maxime scibilia".
Maxime autem dicuntur scibilia dupliciter: uel quia primo omnium sciuntur sine quibus non possunt alia sciri; uel quia sunt certissima cognoscibilia. Utroque autem modo considerat ista scientia maxime scibilia. Haec igitur est maxime scientia, et per consequens maxime desiderabilis.
Quaestiones subtilissimae de metaphysicam Aristotelis, as translated in: William A. Frank, Allan Bernard Wolter (1995) Duns Scotus, metaphysician. p. 18-19

Books, Way, Nature, Knowledge

Quotes about men page 3

Quotes about men
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