Quotes about men
page 68

Cesare Pavese photo
Michael Swanwick photo

“These hands were almost crippled digging coal so that rich men in Boston might grow even richer.”

Michael Swanwick (1950) American science fiction author

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 4, “Mutagen Fair” (p. 130)

George Washington Plunkitt photo
Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Oliver Cromwell photo

“A few honest men are better than numbers.”

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) English military and political leader

Letter to Sir William Spring (September 1643)

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“One of the sayings of Diogenes was that most men were within a finger’s breadth of being mad; for if a man walked with his middle finger pointing out, folks would think him mad, but not so if it were his forefinger.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Diogenes, 6.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 6: The Cynics

Hilaire Belloc photo

“The object of a religion or a philosophy is not to make men wealthy or powerful, but to make them, in the last issue, happy: that is, to fulfil their being.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: Survivals and New Arrivals (1929), Ch. III Survivals (iii) The "Wealth and Power" Argument

David Lloyd George photo
Colin Wilson photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Mary Meeker photo
Joseph Massad photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“It is now one of my greatest blessings (for which I would thank Heaven from the heart) that he lived to see me, through various obstructions, attain some look of doing well. He had "educated" me against much advice, I believe, and chiefly, if not solely, from his own noble faith. James Bell, one of our wise men, had told him, "Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." My father once told me this, and added, "Thou hast not done so; God be thanked for it." I have reason to think my father was proud of me (not vain, for he never, except when provoked, openly bragged of us); that here too he lived to see the pleasure of the Lord prosper in his hands. Oh, was it not a happiness for me! The fame of all this planet were not henceforth so precious.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)
Context: Clearness, emphatic clearness, was his highest category of man's thinking power. He delighted always to hear good argument. He would often say, I would like to hear thee argue with him." He said this of Jeffrey and me, with an air of such simple earnestness, not two years ago (1830), and it was his true feeling. I have often pleased him much by arguing with men (as many years ago I was prone to do) in his presence. He rejoiced greatly in my success, at all events in my dexterity and manifested force. Others of us he admired for our "activity," our practical valor and skill, all of us (generally speaking) for our decent demeanor in the world. It is now one of my greatest blessings (for which I would thank Heaven from the heart) that he lived to see me, through various obstructions, attain some look of doing well. He had "educated" me against much advice, I believe, and chiefly, if not solely, from his own noble faith. James Bell, one of our wise men, had told him, "Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." My father once told me this, and added, "Thou hast not done so; God be thanked for it." I have reason to think my father was proud of me (not vain, for he never, except when provoked, openly bragged of us); that here too he lived to see the pleasure of the Lord prosper in his hands. Oh, was it not a happiness for me! The fame of all this planet were not henceforth so precious.

George William Russell photo
Margaret Mead photo
Roden Noel photo
Harriet Harman photo

“It wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough airports for all the men who'd want to flee the country.”

Harriet Harman (1950) British politician

Regarding her possibility of becoming Prime Minister, during Prime Minister's Questions, August, 2008. Link to the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG64EwwmO90.

Ramakrishna photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
David Hume photo
Robert Williams Buchanan photo
George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo

“Men who borrow their Opinions can never repay their Debts. They are Beggars by Nature, and can therefore never get a Stock to grow rich upon.”

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

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

Bernard Cornwell photo
Bartolomé de las Casas photo
John Steinbeck photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Leo Tolstoy photo

“The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions).

One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the Übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love—virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist? (1902), Chapter 11

Lillian Smith (author) photo
William Wordsworth photo

“Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great, is passed away.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, l. 13 (1807).

Wilfred Owen photo

“Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)

Baldur von Schirach photo

“If you outlaw half a million people you make martyrs of them. For example, if you outlaw Robin Hood, it is all very well, but if you outlaw a whole group of people around Robin Hood, then Robin Hood and his merry men become legends.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

To Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Alexander Pope photo

“When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

Camille Paglia photo
Yukio Mishima photo
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi photo

“Would we be existent O men, while people are frightened at home? what kind of manhood is this? what would we say to God in the judge day as we are responsible for the security of people? no we would better go and die.”

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (1954) Current President of Egypt

Remarks by el-Sisi during a military conference (28 April 2013) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC93fn9s3-c.
2013

Arthur Helps photo

“Do not mistake energy for enthusiasm; the softest speakers are often the most enthusiastic of men.”

Arthur Helps (1813–1875) British writer

Source: Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd. 1901, p.17.

John Lancaster Spalding photo
Catharine A. MacKinnon photo

“Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 62
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

Martin Van Buren photo

“I tread in the footsteps of illustrious men… in receiving from the people the sacred trust confided to my illustrious predecessor.”

Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) American politician, 8th President of the United States (in office from 1837 to 1841)

Inaugural address (1837)

Philipp Meyer photo
Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Shi Nai'an photo

“Within the bounds of the four seas, all men are brothers.”

Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan)

S.L.A. Marshall photo

“Truly then, it is killing men with kindness not to insist upon physical standards during training which will give them maximum fitness for the extraordinary stresses of campaigning in war.”

S.L.A. Marshall (1900–1977) United States Army general and Military historian

The Aggressive Will. p. 174.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

George Eliot photo
Henry Timrod photo
Mark Satin photo
Josh Billings photo

“I beleave in the universal salvashun ov men, but I want tew pick the men.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Janusz Korwin-Mikke photo

“Women must earn less than men because they are weaker, smaller and less intelligent. They must earn less, that's all.”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

Source: EU Parliament, 03 March 2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNs_nn_qBIQ

“If he met resistance he threw men at it; if the obstacle was insurmountable he went around it; if the odds were hopeless he trusted in Jippir”

Mark Rosenfelder American language inventor

God
About a leader of the Tžuro http://www.zompist.com/almea.htm#Tzhuro
Fictional sayings

Camille Paglia photo
George W. Bush photo
William Cobbett photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Alexandra Kollontai photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. […] It is breaking Aristotle's canon—to demand in every enquiry that the degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).

John Masefield photo
John Burroughs photo
Frances Kellor photo

“Americanization today is little more than an impulse, and its context, as popularly conceived, is both narrow and superficial. As French has been the language of diplomacy in the past, so English is to be the language of the reconstruction of the world. English is the language of 90,000,000 people living in America. The English language is a highway of loyalty; it is a medium of exchange; it is the open door to opportunity; it is a means of common defense. It is an implement of Americanization, but it is not necessarily Americanization. The American who thinks that America is united and safe when all men speak one language has only to look at Austria and to study the Jugo-Slav and Czecho-Slovak nationalistic movements. The imposition of a language is not the creation of nationalism. A common language is essential to a common understanding, and by all means let America open such a line of communication. The traffic that goes over this line is, however, the vital thing, and what that shall be and how it is to be prepared are matters to which but little thought has been given. Even those who urge the abolition of all other languages are indefinite about the restriction. Shall a man after he has learned English be allowed to get news in a foreign language paper and to worship in his native tongue; and if not, what becomes of the liberty which he is urged to learn English in order to appreciate? Are foreign languages to be encouraged as an expression of culture and to be denied as a means of economic and political expression? The English language campaigns in America have failed because they have not secured the support of the foreign-born. Men must have reasons for learning new languages, and America has never presented the case conclusively or satisfactorily. Furthermore, wherever the case has been presented, it has not been done with the proper facilities and under favorable conditions. The working day must not be so long that men cannot study.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Clive Staples Lewis photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot photo

“I spent the winter [1859-1860, when he was painting 'Orfée et Euridice'] in the Elysian fields, where I was very happy; you must admit that if painting is a folly, it’s a sweet folly that men should not only forgive but seek out.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot told Dumensnil in 1875; as quoted in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 290 – note 18
1870s

Arnold Toynbee photo
William Allingham photo

“Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Poem: The Fairies http://www.bartleby.com/101/769.html.

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Bob Dylan photo

“Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Lead Belly too
An' to all the good people that traveled with you
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Compare: "We come with the dust and we go with the wind." Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty.
Song lyrics, Bob Dylan (1962), Song to Woody

Revilo P. Oliver photo

“There can be no question but that Christianity was originally a Jewish promotion, and it is noteworthy that the Christians who try to make their cult respectable in the Third Century claim that they repudiate the Jews. One of the earliest to do this was Tertullian, a Carthaginian shyster, whose Apologeticum, a defense of Christianity, was written at the very beginning of the Third Century. He asserts that Christianity is not a conspiracy of revolutionaries and degenerates, as was commonly believed, and claims that it is an association of loving brothers who have preserved the faith that the Jews forsook – which has been the common story ever since. Our holy men salvage Tertullian by claiming that he was "orthodox" in his early writings, but then, alas! became a Montanist heretic, poor fellow. Tertullian is the author of the famous dictum that he believes the impossible because it is absurd (credo quia absurdum), so he is naturally dear to the heart of the pious. How much Jerome and other saints have tampered with the facts to make Tertullian seem "orthodox" in his early works has been most fully shown by Timothy Barnes in his Tertullian (Oxford, 1971), but even he spends a hundred pages pawing over chronological difficulties that can be reconciled by what seems to me the simple and obvious solution: Tertullian, who was evidently a pettifogging lawyer before he got into the Gospel-business, had sense enough to eliminate from his brief for the Christians facts that would have displeased the pagans whom he was trying to convince that Christians represented no threat to civilized society; he accordingly concealed in his apologetic works the peculiar doctrines of the Christian sect to which he had been originally "converted," but he naturally expounded those doctrines in writings intended, not for the eyes of wicked pagans, but for other brands of Christians, whom he wished to convert to his own sect, which was that of Montanus, a very Holy Prophet (divinely inspired, of course) who was a Phrygian, not a Jew, and who had learned from chats with God that since the Jews had muffed their big opportunity at the time of the Crucifixion, Jesus, when he returned next year or the year after that, was going to set up his New Jerusalem in Phrygia after he had raised hell with the pagans and tormented and butchered them in all of the delightful ways so lovingly described in the Apocalypse, the Hymn of Hate that still soothes the souls of "fundamentalist" Christians today. If, in his Apologeticum and similar works, Tertullian had told the stupid pagans that they were going to be tortured and exterminated in a year or two, they might have doubted that Christians were the innocent little lambs that Tertullian claimed they were.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

“Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed.”

Milton Mayer (1908–1986) American journalist

Source: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-35 (1955), p. 62; cited in: Quotable Quotes: They Thought They Were Free http://econengineer.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/quotable-quotes-they-thought-they-were-free/ by John@EconEngineer in: The Economical Engineer (1 July 2012)

Richard Hooker photo

“That to live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery.”

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) English bishop and Anglican Divine

Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (1594), Book I, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Harry V. Jaffa photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Gene Wolfe photo
James Russell Lowell photo

“Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences in belief.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Witchcraft
Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890)

Paul Newman photo

“Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in Paul Newman: A Life in Pictures, ed. Yann-Brice Dherbier and Pierre-Henri Verlhac (2006), p. 93

Warren Farrell photo

“Divorces led to bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protect women individually.”

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 238.

Francis Escudero photo
Warren Farrell photo
Matthew Henry photo

“Men of polite learning and a liberal education.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Acts 10.
Commentaries

Gore Vidal photo

“Men are odd. If they cannot be first, they don't in the least mind being last.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 8

John Aubrey photo
William James photo
Edgar Guest photo