Quotes about men
page 49

“Man's carnivorous nature is not taken for granted, or praised in the fundamental teachings of Judaism. The rabbis of the 111:32). The implication is clear, that Judaism was engaged in weaning men from such practices. Judaism as a religion offers the option of eating animal flesh, and most Jews do, but in our own country there has been a movement towards vegetarianism among very pious Jews. A whole galaxy of central rabbinic and spiritual teachers including several past and present Chief Rabbis of the Holy Land, have been affirming vegetarianism as the ultimate meaning of Jewish moral teaching. They have been proclaiming the autonomy of all living creatures as the value which our religious tradition must now teach to all of its believers.”

Arthur Hertzberg (1921–2006) American rabbi and historian

“The Jewish Declaration on Nature,” from “ The Assisi Declarations http://www.arcworld.org/downloads/THE%20ASSISI%20DECLARATIONS.pdf” in for WWF's 25th anniversary (29 September 1986).

Religion, Nature, Teachers, Past

“Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 17)

Intelligence, Passion

“It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Fools, Freedom

“I find that to be a fool as to worldly wisdom, and to commit my cause to God, not fearing to offend men, who take offence at the simplicity of truth, is the only way to remain unmoved at the sentiments of others.”

John Woolman (1720–1772) American Quaker preacher

Source: The Journal of John Woolman (1774), p. 36; as cited in: Ruth Marie Griffith (2008) American Religions: A Documentary History. p. 137

Wisdom, God, Truth, Fear

“Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory. They venerate thee as their protector and Patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious power of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude. Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church. Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations.”

Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903) 256th Pope of the Catholic Church

Prayer to Saint Michael (1888)

God, People, Peace, Soul

“The laws of certain states …give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property…. But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war …thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

As quoted in Papers of Alexander Hamilton http://www.vindicatingthefounders.com/library/five-founders-on-slavery.html, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-), 19:101-2 Philo Camillus no. 2 (1795)

God, War, Law, Nature

“Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations — wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795)
Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795)

Beer, Wine, Time, Country

“The new industrial methods have greatly accelerated certain tendencies that had already manifested themselves in the old domestic factories and some of these deserve more than passing notice as they are affecting not only productive processes but our social organization as well. Perhaps the most important of these influences are those that tend toward
(1) Aggregation or increase in size of industrial enterprises.
(2) Specialization or the limiting of the field of activity, not only of enterprises but also of men.
(3) Standardization or the reduction of all lines of product to a limited number of types and sizes.
(4) Extreme division of labor, following aggregation, specialization, and standardization and requiring special consideration.
These tendencies are all closely interlocked with each other, and with modern productive methods. It will be clearer, however, to discuss them separately before summing up their joint action.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 34

“There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry.”

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

"Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" http://www.wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/MLK.pdf address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University (18 December 1963) 1960s Context: There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize — I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to — segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence…

World, Hope

“The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Women

“To comprehend evolutionary Theory, one must first understand that it’s only ever a matter of changing proportions –altering or enhancing existing features to build on what is already there. Developmental biology, genetics, and comparative morphology combine to confirm many of these taxonomic stages such that organs do not seem to have appeared abruptly or fully-formed as if out of nowhere, because there is an implied evolutionary origin evident in every case. Even the transition of fish-to-tetrapods, dinosaurs-to-birds, or apes-to-men are each are just a matter of incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities. These represent monophyletic clades which will forever encompass all the descendants of that clade. This is why birds are still dinosaurs, and humans are still apes, and both are still stegocephalian chordates.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y, Youtube (June 26, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Understanding, Bird, Fish, Appearance

“The essential feature of a capitalist world-economy… is production for sale in a market in which the object is to realize the maximum profit is the essential feature of a capitalist world-economy. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing things that will expand the profit margin.”

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) economic historian

Wallerstein (1979) The Capitalist World-Economy. p. 15.

World, Way

“The Comtists are right when they say that men's moral ideas are not fixed. The attitude of public opinion towards slavery was completely changed in twenty or thirty years. Still I am obliged to believe that such a moral revolution as the Comtists hope for is not possible within a reasonable space of time.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 150

Hope, Idea, Change, Time

“I have played some of the great men in history and I believe in the great man who does heroic deeds, even in these egalitarian times.”

Charlton Heston (1923–2008) American actor

Sunday Times interview (1990)

History, Time

“The prophecy of Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz, that the occupation would corrupt us through and through and turn us into a people of exploiters and secret-service-men, has come awfully true. Nothing has remained of the "beautiful Eretz Israel " but a cloying nostalgia, of which Naomi Shemer was a standard-bearer. A small and gallant state, progressive and (relatively) egalitarian, respected by the world, has become an occupying and looting state, hostage to delirious settlers, full of internal violence and "swinish capitalism" (a phrase coined by Shimon Peres, one of those most responsible for this situation). Throughout the world, the idea of boycotting Israel is gaining ground.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

Death of a Myth (May 12, 2005)

People, Secret, World, Beauty

“It seems to me that any cult has to have the following characteristics: One, a dictatorial leader, often called charismatic, who has total and unlimited control over his group. Two, followers who have abdicated the right to say no, the right to pass judgment, the right to protest, who have sold their souls for the security of slavery. Three, possibly the most dangerous doctrine known to our civilization, that the end justifies the means; therefore, any thing from the Moonies' heavenly deception to the violence of Synanon to the theft of government documents by Scientology, to the brutality of the Children of God, all the way to the murder-suicide of Jonestown, all is permitted because the ends justify the means and there is no one there to tell them no. Four, unlimited funds. The Unification Church with its some $50 million brought in each year by its mobile fund raising teams is duplicated by the Hare Krishnas dressing as Santa Claus or the Children of God sending out their women as fishers of men. Five, the instilling of fear, hatred, and suspicion of everyone outside the camp, of the entire outside world in order to keep the victims in line. You put them all together gentlemen -- You have a prescription for violence, for death, for destruction. It is a formula that fits the Nazi Youth Movement as accurately as it describes the Unification Church. Or the People's Temple.”

Maurice Davis (1921–1993) American rabbi

Ibid., February 5, 1979.

Death, Women, God, Children

“Carol James, who is my physician's assistant and my right-hand person, frequently teases me by saying, "It's because women need only half of their brain to think as well as men. That's why you can do this operation on so many women."”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (1990), p. 161

Women, Thinking, Personality

“It is, as a rule, far more important how men pursue their occupation than what the occupation is which they select.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

The Opportunity in the Law, 39 American Law Review 555, 555 (1905).
Extra-judicial writings

“With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

The Railroad Trainman (November 1909)

Education

“The game of power is played remorselessly by men who have not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, the way ordinary people live, and the ordinary people are too terrified to protest.”

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911–1983) British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer

A Vision of the Uncorrupted Society, p. 279 (See also: Niccolò Machiavelli..)
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

People, Way, Game, Knowledge

“Great men don't 'move to the center' — great men move the center!”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some New Tactical Reflections".

“Of women he [Voltaire] has no very high opinion. To judge from his treatment of them, their minds are exclusively occupied by the prospect of making love to handsome young men with good figures, though, being both venal and timid, they are prepared to hire their bodies to old inquisitors or soldiers if, by so doing, they can save their own lives or amass riches. They are inconstant, and will gladly cut off the nose of a husband fondly mourned in order to cure a new lover.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Love, Women, Making love, Lovers

“Life is each human being's workshop. If a man survives a lifetime with his creative capacities intact, he has done his part to make a better world for all men.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

12. Prescription for Survival
Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966)

Life, World, Parting

“Realists are, as a rule, only men in the rut of routine who are incapable of transcending a narrow circle of antiquated notions.”

Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer

Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] (1896)

“My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity--intuition and compassion and tenderness--and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.”

Carlos Santana (1947) Mexican and American rock musician

Carlos Santana on his father.http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2000_Summer/ai_63500762

Beauty, Problem

“[The art of the novel] does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 25: The Glow-Worm

Art, Passion, Heart, Personality

“Every man knows there are evils in this world which need setting right. Every man has pretty definite ideas as what these evils are. But to most men one in particular stands out vividly. To some, in fact, this stands out with such startling vividness that they lose sight of other evils, or look upon them as the natural consequence of their own particular evil-in-chief.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

Henry Hazlitt, Thinking As A Science (1916).

World, Idea, Nature, Evil

“A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth!”

Stendhal book The Charterhouse of Parma

Une femme de quarante ans n'est plus quelque chose que pour les hommes qui l'ont aimée dans sa jeunesse!
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 23

Love, Youth

“All of us forget more than we remember, and therefore it hath been my constant Custom to note down and record whatever I thought of myself, or receiv'd from Men, or Books worth preserving. Among other things, I wrote out Apothegms, Maxims, Proverbs, acute Expressions, vulgar Sayings, &c. And having at length collected more than ever any Englishman has before me, I have ventur'd to send them forth, to try their Fortune among the People.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Excerpt from Gnomologia, To the Reader (Prefatory Remarks).
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

People, Books, Forgetting

“On United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States reaffirms its commitment to the worldwide elimination of torture. Freedom from torture is an inalienable human right, and we are committed to building a world where human rights are respected and protected by the rule of law…Throughout the world, there are many who have been seeking to have their voices heard, to stand up for their right to freedom, and to break the chains of tyranny. Too many of those courageous women and men are paying a terrible price for their brave acts of dissent. Many have been detained, arrested, thrown in prison, and subjected to torture by regimes that fail to understand that their habits of control will not serve them well in the long-term.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

June 26 http://usinfo.state.gov/dhr/Archive/2005/Jun/27-499670.html 2000s, 2005

Women, World, Law, Courage

“123. Happy is the monk who considers all men as god — after God.”

Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) Christian monk

Chapters on Prayer

God, Happiness

“The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshiped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. I: The Naked and the Nude

Life, Death, God, Fear

“Let us look back on the conduct of Mr. Attlee and his friends in the years before the war. The Labour Party denounced the Baldwin Government for "planning a vast and expensive rearmament programme"… Mr. Attlee said on November 10, 1935: "The National Government is preparing a great programme of rearmament which will endanger the peace of the world". Mr. Morrison, in the same month, said "the Government leaders are all urging a policy of rearmament, and Mr. Chamberlain is ready and anxious to spend millions of pounds on machines of destruction". I suppose those must have been the aeroplanes which saved us in the Battle of Britain. And, again: "Every vote for the Unionists would be a vote for an international race in arms, and a vote for that was a vote for war". Such was the language of the Socialist leaders in the years while Hitler's Germany was rearming night and day…. And yet… at the election of 1945, the Labour Party gained great credit by denouncing the Chamberlain Government as guilty men for not having made larger and more timely arrangements.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Woodford (12 October 1951), quoted in The Times (13 October 1951), p. 9
Post-war years (1945–1955)

War, World, Peace, Time

“In all well-conducted concerns the law of "selection of the fittest" sooner or later comes into happy action, when a loyal and attached set of men work together harmoniously for their own advantage as well as for that of their employers.”

James Nasmyth (1808–1890) Scottish mechanical engineer and inventor

Source: James Nasmyth engineer, 1883, p. 218 (p. 181 in 2010 edition)

Law, Happiness

“This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part. In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 31

World, Home, Sense, Past

“No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume II, Chapter XVI
Romola (1863)

Life, Death, Truth, Angels

“I also have a message for all Americans: The capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq. We still face terrorists who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the rise of liberty in the heart of the Middle East. Such men are a direct threat to the American people, and they will be defeated.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Remarks on the Capture of Saddam Hussein (December 2003)

People, Heart

“At the outset the solemn asseverations of monarchs and leading statesmen in each nation that they did not want war must be placed on a par with the declarations of men who pour paraffin about a house knowing they are continually striking matches and yet assert they do not want a conflagration. This form of self-deception, which involved the deception of others, is fundamentally dishonest.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

War, Housing

“Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transpose.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. II, line 440.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

“Any one who is much talked of, must be much maligned. This seems to be a harsh conclusion; but when you consider how much more given men are to depreciate than to appreciate, you will acknowledge that there is some truth in the saying.”

Arthur Helps (1813–1875) British writer

Source: Brevia: Short Essays and Aphorisms. (1871), p. 6

Truth

“Because there are indeed women in Iceland, it will now be proven to you, you ugly wench, that there are also men in Iceland!”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Jón Hreggviðsson
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part I: Iceland's Bell

Women

“Do I have a body? Or have I none?
Am I who I am? Or am I not?
Pondering these questions, I sit
Leaning against the cliff while the years go by
And the green grass grows up between my feet
And the red dust settles on my head
Then men of the world come and thinking me dead
Bring offerings of wine and fruit”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World, Question, Thinking, Grass

“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 17, p. 64

Suffering, Parting, Happiness

“I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.”

Sinclair Lewis book It Can't Happen Here

President Buzz Windrip in his autobiography "Zero Hour."
It Can't Happen Here (1935)

Family, Light

“The first duty of a government is to be true to itself. This does not mean perfection, it means a plan to strive for perfection. It means loyalty to ideals. The ideals of America were set out in the Declaration of Independence and adopted in the Constitution. They did not represent perfection at hand, but perfection found. The fundamental principle was freedom. The fathers knew that this was not yet apprehended. They formed a government firm in the faith that it was ever to press toward this high mark. In selfishness, in greed, in lust for gain, it turned aside. Enslaving others, it became itself enslaved. Bondage in one part consumed freedom in all parts. The government of the fathers, ceasing to be true to itself, was perishing. Five score and ten years ago, that divine providence which infinite repetition has made only the more a miracle, sent into the world a new life destined to save a nation. No star, no sign foretold his coming. About his cradle all was poor and mean, save only the source of all great men, the love of a wonderful woman. When she faded away in his tender years from her deathbed in humble poverty, she endowed her son with greatness. There can be no proper observance of a birthday which forgets the mother. Into his origin, as into his life, men long have looked and wondered. In wisdom great, but in humility greater, in justice strong, but in compassion stronger, he became a leader of men by being a follower of the truth. He overcame evil with good. His presence filled the nation. He broke the might of oppression. He restored a race to its birthright.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Duty of Government (1920)

Love, Life, Wisdom, Truth

“That all men are created equal does not mean that human beings are the same, or equal, in size, strength, beauty, virtue, or intelligence. There are obviously great differences in individual aptitudes and talents in sports, music, mathematics, speaking, and writing. They are also unequal in the virtues, among them courage, temperance, and justice. But as Jefferson once said, the fact that Sir Isaac Newton may be the most intelligent of living human beings does not give him any right whatever to my person or my property.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), The American Proposition

Justice, Beauty, Music, Intelligence

“We have erased segregation in those areas of national life to which Federal authority clearly extends. So doing in this, my friends, we have neither sought nor claimed partisan credit, and all such actions are nothing more -- nothing less than the rendering of justice. And we have always been aware of this great truth: the final battle against intolerance is to be fought -- not in the chambers of any legislature -- but in the hearts of men.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Address at the Hollywood Bowl http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html (19 October 1956) 1950s

Life, Truth, Justice, Heart

“At 8 o’clock, the [body] of the hall was nearly filled with an intelligent and respectable looking audience – The exercises commenced with a patriotic song by the Hutchinsons, which was received with great applause. The Rev. H. H. Garnett opened the meeting stating that the black man, a fugitive from Virginia, who was announced to speak would not appear, as a communication had been received yesterday from the South intimating that, for prudential reasons, it would not be proper for that person to appear, as his presence might affect the interests and safety of others in the South, both white persons and colored. He also stated that another fugitive slave, who was at the battle of Bull Run, proposed when the meeting was announced to be present, but for a similar reason he was absent; he had unwillingly fought on the side of Rebellion, but now he was, fortunately where he could raise his voice on the side of Union and universal liberty. The question which now seemed to be prominent in the nation was simply whether the services of black men shall be received in this war, and a speedy victory be accomplished. If the day should ever come when the flag of our country shall be the symbol of universal liberty, the black man should be able to look up to that glorious flag, and say that it was his flag, and his country’s flag; and if the services of the black men were wanted it would be found that they would rush into the ranks, and in a very short time sweep all the rebel party from the face of the country”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Douglass Monthly https://web.archive.org/web/20160309192511/http://deadconfederates.com/tag/black-confederates/#_edn2 (March 1862), p. 623 1860s

War, Color, Exercises, Intelligence

“Have I your word?” “yes, you have my word. But, you don’t believe me.” “no, men’s promises to women are easily made and even more easily broken.””

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Beguiled

Women

“Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, A Liberal Education and Where to Find It (1868)

Love, Education, Law, Way

“I have sought permanently to associate the advancement of knowledge with the widest possible civic and public diffusion of it; and this without any academic limitations, henceforth to all races and languages, to both men and women alike, and for all time coming.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose in Vijayaprasara

Women, Knowledge, Time

“I'm empowered to stand here thanks to the ensemble of actors, men and women, who I shared the screen with and who in ways they will never understand made me a better actor.”

Tom Hanks (1956) American actor

67th Academy Award Speech (1995)

Women, Way, Understanding

“it will never be outmoded as long as the systole and diastole of human life survives, and men fluctuate between progress and reaction, growth and decline, hope and illusion.”

Robert Gordis (1908–1992) American rabbi and theologian

"Koheleth - the Man and his World", p. 3

Life, Hope

“(Television) The brain is differently wired in men and women. (Sylvia) In men, the wires are loose.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 26

Women

“Our modern religious horizon and our conception of the character of a religious leader and teacher are so different that it is not easy to understand men who saw the province of religion chiefly in the broad reaches of civic affairs and international relations.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 10

Religion, Understanding, Teachers

“One of our fan-coloring biographers, who paints small men as very great, inquired of me lately with real affection too, whether he might consider as authentic, the change of my religion much spoken of in some circles. Now this supposed that they knew what had been my religion before, taking for it the word of their priests, whom I certainly never made the confidants of my creed. My answer was "say nothing of my religion. It is known to my God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (11 January 1817), published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 48–49 1810s

Life, God, World, Religion

“Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy. They do their duty, these shopkeeping souls, but they clip the coin a trifle, like the Jews; they think that even if the Lord keeps ever so careful a set of books, they may still cheat Him a little. Out upon them! This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings; they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Swenson, 1959, p. 27
1840s, Either/Or (1843)

Love, God, Hate, Books

“So comes a reckoning when the banquet's o'er,—
The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

The What d' ye call it (1715). Comparable to: "The time of paying a shot in a tavern among good fellows, or Pantagruelists, is still called in France a 'quart d'heure de Rabelais,'—that is, Rabelais's quarter of an hour, when a man is uneasy or melancholy", Life of Rabelais (Bohn's edition), p. 13

Smile

“The weak, when they have authority, surround themselves with the weak. It is, indeed, a vice of rulers that men who have exceptional ability and worth are offensive to them, since they whose greatness is due to their position find it difficult to love those whom inner power makes great.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Aphorisms and Reflections (1901)

Love

“The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

World

“All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

Boy, Time

“All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Attributed to Butler in: American Dental Association (1959) The Journal of the American Dental Association. Vol 59. p. 289

World, Problem, Thinking

“The finds were of extreme interest to the Second Men, but not in the manner which the Siberian party had intended, not as a store of scientific and philosophic truth, but as a vivid historical document. The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of the earlier species was invaluable.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 3, “The Zenith of the Second Men” (pp. 112-113)

Truth, Universe

“Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)

Secret, Law, Thinking, Learning

“Traffic in marijuana is increasing to such an extent that it has come to the be cause for the greatest national concern.
This drug is as old as civilization itself. Homer wrote about, as a drug that made men forget their homes, and that turned them into swine. In Persia, a thousand years before Christ, there was a religious and military order founded which was called the Assassins and they derived their name from the drug called hashish which is now known in this country as marihuana. They were noted for their acts of cruelty, and the word "assassin" very aptly describes the drug.”

Harry J. Anslinger (1892–1975) 1st Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics

Hearing on H.R. 6385 (April 1937) http://www.druglibrary.org/SCHAFFER/hemp/taxact/anslng1.htm

Home, Swine, Christ, Marijuana

“Why I do things? Because I get great happiness, and happiness is the thing which makes the love flow, which makes me love. I want to be happy. And that is why I consider myself as one of the most happiest men in the world, because I do these things. I give this Knowledge to people free of charge. And people when they get this Knowledge feel great happiness. That makes me happy, too.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Montrose, Colorado, July 27, 1972
1970s

Love, People, World, Feeling

“Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Scotland & The Scottish People https://books.google.com/books?id=NINHAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=scotland+%26+the+scottish+people&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIuKPUmZGkyAIVQ5qACh0kewz7#v=onepage&q=scotland%20%26%20the%20scottish%20people&f=false

History

“The principle of inorganic equality was for them crucial. Men of the stamp of Jahn and Arndt had no notion that it was Equality that had first sounded the cry of "Vive la nation" in the September massacres of 1792.
They forgot, too, one basic fact. The Romanticism of their Volkslieder sang only the heroism of the common soldier, but the inner worth of these armies (at first amateurs in the calling of arms), their spirit, their discipline, and their training, depended upon the quality of the officer‑ corps, whose adequacy was due entirely to eighteenth-century traditions. With the Jacobins also a body of soldiers was morally worth precisely as much as its officer, who had trained it by his example. Napoleon confessed at St. Helena that he would not have been beaten had he had for his superb fighting material a corps of officers like the Austrian, a corps in which chivalrous traditions of loyalty, honour, and silent self-discipline still survived. Once the command wavers in its intentions and its attitude—or itself abdicates, as in 1918—the bravest regiment becomes on the spot a cowardly and helpless herd. …
All young sects are at bottom hostile to State and property, class and rank, and are attracted to universal equality.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

The Hour of Decision (1933)

Hostility, Universe, Fight, Dependency

“Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time.
This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program.
But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Scouts"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Women, People, Food, Boy

“Young men and fools sometimes bear pain they do not have to as a badge of their pride. Or their foolishness.”

Robert Jordan A Crown of Swords

Nandera
A Crown of Swords (15 May 1996)

Pain, Fools

“While reasonable men will ungrudgingly submit to such curtailment of their liberties as will promote at least the greater liberty of all, to the exact degree to which such curtailment may become unreasonable will the enforcement of it have to rest on force. Force against reason: reason, because it has the power of enlisting force to fight for it, will win. From the recognition of that truth has come democracy.”

Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) American artist

This Is My Own, p. 130 (1940)

Truth, Democracy, Fight

“There are many cases where landlords take advantage of the needs of municipalities and even of national needs and of the monopoly which they have got in land in a particular neighbourhood in order to demand extortionate prices. Take the very well-known case of the Duke of Northumberland, when a county council wanted to buy a small plot of land as a site for a school to train the children who in due course would become the men labouring on his property. The rent was quite an insignificant thing; his contribution to the rates I think it was on the basis of 30s. an acre. What did he demand for it for a school? £900 an acre. All we say is this—if it is worth £900, let him pay taxes on £900.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 148.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Children, School, Thinking, Training

“Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Franklyn, in Pt. II : The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“Moving a fortnight behind his vanguard, the AbdAli king himself came upon the scene. He had stormed Ballabhgarh on 3rd March and halted there for two days. On 15th March he arrived near MathurA, and wisely avoiding that reeking human shambles crossed over to the eastern bank of the Jamuna and encamped at MahAvan, six miles south-east of the city. Two miles to his west lay Gokul, the seat of the pontiff of the rich VallabhAcharya sect. The AbdAli’s policy of frightfulness had defeated his cupidity: dead men could not be held to ransom. The invader’s unsatisfied need of money was pressing him; he sought the help of ImAd’s local knowledge as to the most promising sources of booty. A detachment from his camp was sent to plunder Gokul. But here the monks were martial NAgA sannyAsis of upper India and RajputAna. Four thousand of these naked ash-smeared warriors stood outside Gokul and fought the AfghAns, till half of their own number was killed after slaying an equal force of the enemy. Then at the entreaty of the Bengal subahdAr’s envoy (Jugalkishor) and his assurance that a hermitage of faqirs could not contain any money, the AbdAli recalled the detachment. ‘All the vairAgis perished but Gokulnath [the deity of the city] was saved’, as a Marathi newsletter puts it.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Rajwade, i. 63.
Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume II, Fourth Edition, New Delhi, 1991, p.70-71

Money, Knowledge, Help, Dead

“Once upon a time men resisted the implications of actuality. That day is gone. We know now that art is the thing itself together with its extensions into superfluity. Not pop art, I hasten to say, which sneers and exaggerates. This is popular art, which simply exists. This is the age in which we unconditionally accept the unacceptable, and thus proclaim the naturalness of our artificiality.”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 28 (p. 187)

Age, Art, Nature, Time

“There are men who are willing to marry a woman they do not care about merely because she is admired by other men. Such a relation exists between many men and their thoughts.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Es gibt Männer, die imstande sind, eine Frau, die sie in keiner Weise anzieht, zu heiraten—bloß weil sie den anderen gefällt. Und solche Ehen gibt es auch zwischen so manchen Menschen und ihren Gedanken.
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 104.

“I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusionism that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 69

Women, World

“If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Page 73 (1928 edition)
Propaganda (1928)

Feeling, Nature

“All I can say is that women, when they govern, are much harsher than men. Much crueler. Much more bloodthirsty. I'm citing facts, not opinions. You're heartless when you have power. Think of Catherine de Medicis, Catherine of Russia, Elizabeth I of England. Not to mention Lucrezia Borgia, with her poisons and intrigues. You're schemers, you're evil. All of you.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Oriana Fallaci (December 30, 1973), The Mystically Divine Shah of Iran (interview), Chicago Tribune
Interviews

Women, Thinking, Evil

“Under this cold moonlight he felt the shimmer of self. He felt no guilt, no pain, no remorse for what he'd done. He could have killed if he wanted to, but he did not. He felt as if he understood men, their discontent, their need to see what they'd not seen before, their need to be where they'd never been. He was one of them. He'd lived in a world of killing and blood and this world was returned to him. He'd lived in the silence and ineluctable mystery of violence. He knew the hold war had on him, the gore that would never come off in this world. He knew he could have killed Mercy's brother with his hands and it was the knowledge that gave him peace.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

Source: The Coldest Night (2012), p. 243

Pain, War, World, Peace

“As all those have shown who have discussed civil institutions, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity; and if such malignity is hidden for a time, it proceeds from the unknown reason that would not be known because the experience of the contrary had not been seen, but time, which is said to be the father of every truth, will cause it to be discovered.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book Discourses on Livy

Book 1, Ch. 3 Variant portion: Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
Discourses on Livy (1517)

Truth, Law, History, Time