Quotes about men
page 54

Henry David Thoreau photo
Stephen King photo
Elie Wiesel photo
Adam Smith photo

“It is not for its own sake that men desire money, but for the sake of what they can purchase with it.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter I, p. 471.

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac photo

“God is the poet, men are only the actors.”

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (1597–1654) French author, best known for his epistolary essays

Dieu est le poète et les hommes ne sont que les acteurs.
Socrate Chrétien, Discours VIII.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 42.
Socrate Chrétien (1662)

Robert Hunter (author) photo
George Holmes Howison photo
George Eliot photo
Robert Harris photo
Max Horkheimer photo
Daniel Defoe photo

“The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Character of the Late Dr. S. Annesley (1715).

Albert Jay Nock photo
William Trufant Foster photo
William Wordsworth photo

“Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach
Of ordinary men.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 14.
Resolution and Independence (1807)

Halldór Laxness photo
Thomas Campbell photo

“Ye are brothers! ye are men!
And we conquer but to save.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Battle of the Baltic (1805), st. 5

Paul Newman photo
Warren Farrell photo
Frances Kellor photo

“A first proposition, therefore, in Americanization is to find a way to satisfy the creative instinct in men and their sense of home, by giving them and their native-born sons the widest possible knowledge of America, including a pictorial geography, a simple history of the United States, the stories of successful Americans including those of foreign-born origin; a knowledge of American literature, of our political ideals and institutions, and of oiy: free educational opportunities. A systematic effort should be made to give them a land interest and a home stake and to get them close to the soil, not alone in the day's work but also in their cultural life. The men most likely to desert America at the close of the war will be workers with job stakes and wage rates, and not those with a home stake and investments. I would carry this campaign of information into every foreign language publication, every newspaper, every shop, and every racial center in America. The land interpreter of the future will be the government, and Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has foreseen this in his appeal for the use of the land for the rehabilitation of men returning from the front. It is the land that will make the life of the maimed livable and will connect the past with the future. This will not be achieved by forced "back-to-the-land movements" and colonization. Each individual American who interprets the beauty of America and its meaning, and who, wherever he can, personally puts the foreign-born in touch with the soil and helps him to a plot of ground which he can call his own, is doing effective Americanization. Loyalty and efficiency are inherent in this land sense, and they are the strength of a nation.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Joyce Kilmer photo
Gail Dines photo
Jane Roberts photo
Confucius photo

“The way of the superior man may be found, in its simple elements, in the intercourse of common men and women; but in its utmost reaches, it shines brightly through Heaven and Earth.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

George Herbert photo

“465. In the kingdome of blind men the one-ey'd is king.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
William Blake photo

“What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

No. 4, What Is It
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792), Several Questions Answered

Robert E. Howard photo
Daniel Webster photo

“Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Source: Address on Laying the Cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument (1825), p. 64

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“"God for men — religions for women," he muttered sometimes.”

Part First: The Silver of the Mine, Ch. 4
Nostromo (1904)

Aldous Huxley photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
Vitruvius photo

“Apollo at Delphi, through the oracular utterance of his priestess, pronounced Socrates the wisest of men. Of him it is related that he said with sagacity and great learning that the human breast should have been furnished with open windows, so that men might not keep their feelings concealed, but have them open to the view. Oh that nature, following his idea, had constructed them thus unfolded and obvious to the view.”
Delphicus Apollo Socratem omnium sapientissimum Pythiae responsis est professus. Is autem memoratur prudenter doctissimeque dixisse, oportuisse hominum pectora fenestrata et aperta esse, uti non occultos haberent sensus sed patentes ad considerandum. Utinam vero rerum natura sententiam eius secuta explicata et apparentia ea constituisset!

Preface, Sec. 1
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book III

Warren Farrell photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Mark Tobey photo
G. K. Chesterton photo
Lillian Gish photo
Kent Hovind photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“A lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On the new MPs elected in 1918; quoted by John Maynard Keynes in Economic Consequences of the Peace, Ch. 5
1910s

Wallace Stevens photo
Petr Chelčický photo
Henry Miller photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5779. Wise Men learn by other Men's Harms; Fools, by their own.”

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

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Winston S. Churchill photo

“Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.”

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

Speech in the House of Commons, July 8, 1920 "Amritsar" http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/churchill/am-text.htm ; at the time, Churchill was serving as Secretary of State for War under Prime Minister David Lloyd George
Early career years (1898–1929)

André Maurois photo
Walter Scott photo
Isaiah Berlin photo

“All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)

Murray Leinster photo
Sarah Silverman photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Robert E. Howard photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Warren Farrell photo
Haile Selassie photo
Benjamin N. Cardozo photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“As long as the church has the power to close the lips of men, so long and no longer will superstition rule this world.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Aron Ra photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Wilkie Collins photo

“No man under Heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women. Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace — they drag us away from our parents' love and our sisters' friendship — they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel.”

Vol. I [Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860] ( p. 194 https://books.google.com/books?id=wUN2KP79lhUC&pg=PA194)
Also in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction edited by Andrew Mangham [Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 1-107-51169-0] ( p. 82 https://books.google.com/books?id=rQZCAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA82)
The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins by Catherine Peters [Princeton University Press, 2014, ISBN 1-400-86345-7] ( p. 224 https://books.google.com/books?id=T0AABAAAQBAJ&pg=PA224)
Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann by Sara Lennox [University of Massachusetts Press, 2006, ISBN 1-558-49552-5] ( p. 227 https://books.google.com/books?id=_9VjDtk5ss4C&pg=PA227)
The Law and the Lady (1875)

William F. Buckley Jr. photo
Richard Nixon photo
Aristophanés photo

“Chremylus: And what good thing can [Poverty] give us, unless it be burns in the bath, and swarms of brats and old women who cry with hunger, and clouds uncountable of lice, gnats and flies, which hover about the wretch's head, trouble him, awake him and say, “You will be hungry, but get up!” […]
Poverty: It's not my life that you describe; you are attacking the existence beggars lead. […] The beggar, whom you have depicted to us, never possesses anything. The poor man lives thriftily and attentive to his work; he has not got too much, but he does not lack what he really needs. […] But what you don't know is this, that men with me are worth more, both in mind and body, than with [Wealth]. With him they are gouty, big-bellied, heavy of limb and scandalously stout; with me they are thin, wasp-waisted, and terrible to the foe. […] As for behavior, I will prove to you that modesty dwells with me and insolence with [Wealth]. […] Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy. […]
Chremylus: Then tell me this, why does all mankind flee from you?
Poverty: Because I make them better. Children do the very same; they flee from the wise counsels of their fathers. So difficult is it to see one's true interest.”

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Pl.+535
Plutus, line 535-539 & 548 & 552-554 & 558-561 & 563-564 & 567-570 & 575-578
Plutus (388 BC)

Thomas Carlyle photo
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo

“If Men considered how many Things there are that Riches cannot buy, they would not be so fond of them.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Moral Thoughts and Reflections

T. H. White photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo
Susan Cooper photo

“Nearly every tale that men tell of magic and witches and such is born out of foolishness and ignorance and sickness of mind—or is a way of explaining things they do not understand.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Chapter 6 “The Book of Gramarye” (p. 101)

Joseph Smith, Jr. photo
Winston S. Churchill photo

“Although trade is important, there are other and stronger bonds of Empire, and since the Conference of 1926 nothing but common interests and traditions have held the Empire together. But those are mighty ties, incomprehensible to Europeans, which have drawn millions of men from the far corners of the earth to the battlefields of France, and we must trust to them to continue to draw us together.”

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

Speech in Toronto (16 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 51
Early career years (1898–1929)

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Roberto Clemente photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Alan Moore photo
Samuel Butler photo

“Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Supreme Occasions
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XVII - Material for a Projected Sequel to Alps and Sanctuaries

Eric Hobsbawm photo

“The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

1951; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
from his responding at the 1951 MoMA symposium, in which several artists were asked to respond to the prompt 'What Abstract Art Means to Me'
1950s

George Herbert photo

“[ There is a remedy for everything, could men find it. ]”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Thaddeus Stevens photo
John Calvin photo
George Raymond Richard Martin photo
Robert Jordan photo

“Men! Too blind to see what a stone could see, and too stubborn to be trusted to think for themselves.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Min Farshaw
(15 October 1991)

Derren Brown photo

“Walthamstow Stadium: Where hundreds of men, who all look like my dad, come to watch some thin dogs running around.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

William Gilbert (astronomer) photo
George Trumbull Ladd photo
Pearl S.  Buck photo

“There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

As quoted in The Quotable Woman (1978) by Elaine T Partnow, p. 226. "When men destroy their old gods they will find new ones to take their place" has sometimes been quoted as her original statement, though she states that she herself is quoting an abbot.

Eduard Hanslick photo