Quotes about men
page 75

“Howard University is but one of the many institutions which have grown up in this country, dedicated to this purpose of preserving one of the races of men and fitting it for its largest usefulness. Here is a people adapted, as most people are not, to life in the tropics. They are capable of redeeming vast luxuriant areas of unexampled productivity, and of reclaiming them for the sustenance of mankind and the increasing security of the human community. It is a great destiny, to which we may now look forward with confidence that it will be fully realized.”

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

1920s, The Progress of a People (1924)

Life, People, Confidence, Communication

“A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Article 24 <br class="br"> "Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

“[O]ur constitutions of government have declared that all men are born free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights, among which are the right of enjoying their lives, liberties, and property, and of seeking and obtaining their own safety and happiness. May not the miserable African ask, "Am I not a man and a brother?"”

Joseph Story (1779–1845) US Supreme Court justice

In 1819, as quoted in Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction https://books.google.com/books?id=Tpb7HAIhWHgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=9780199843282&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz1ILxqfLcAhVDnuAKHda9Ai0Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=9780199843282&f=false (2012), by Allen C. Guelzo, Chapter One

Happiness

“Men who don't like girls with brains don't like girls.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Girl

“Queen Mab: For love men will mutilate themselves and murder rivals. For love will even a peaceful man go to war. For Love, man will destroy himself, and do so willingly.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Changes (2010), Chapter 30

Love, War, Peace

“The natural leaning of our minds is in favour of prisoners; and in the mild manner in which the laws of this country are executed, it has rather been a subject of complaint by some that the Judges have given way too easily to mere formal objections on behalf of prisoners, and have been too ready on slight grounds to make favourable representations of their cases. Lord Hale himself, one of the greatest and best men who ever sat in judgment, considered this extreme facility as a great blemish, owing to which more offenders escaped than by the manifestation of their innocence." We must, however, take care not to carry this disposition too far, lest we loosen the bands of society, which is kept together by the hope of reward, and the fear of punishment. It has been always considered, that the Judges in our foreign possessions abroad were not bound by the rules of proceeding in our Courts here. Their laws are often altogether distinct from our own. Such is the case in India and other places. On appeals to the Privy Council from our colonies, no formal objections are attended to, if the substance of the matter or the corpus delicti sufficiently appear to enable them to get at the truth and justice of the case.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

King v. Suddis (1800), 1 East, 314. Lord Kenyon is later reported to have written, "I once before had occasion to refer to the opinion of a most eminent Judge, who was a great Crown lawyer, upon the subject, I mean Lord Hale; who even in his time lamented the too great strictness which had been required in indictments, and which had grown to be a blemish and inconvenience in the law; and observed that more offenders escaped by the over easy ear given to exceptions in indictments than by their own innocence". King v. Airey (c. 1800), 2 East, 34.

Truth, Fear, Justice, Law

“Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Eight, The Outsider as a Visionary

Music, Painting

“One of the men in the boat—I could not remember which character—had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 34 (p. 344)

God, Night

“Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.”

Philip Roth book The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

Women, Sex, Business

“When we speak freely, let us speak plainly, for plain speech is wholesome; especially, plain speech about public affairs and public men.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)

“Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell. Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all!”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

People, Fear, Hope, Way

“I wonder who will find the film more uncomfortable - men or women? Both will recoil from the brutality of the scenes of the assault. But for some men, the movie will reveal a truth that most women already know. It is that verbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence - one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-accused-1988 of The Accused (14 October 1988) <br class="br">Reviews, Three star reviews

Women, Truth, Feeling

“Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace. War is the outcome, not mainly of evil intentions, but on the whole, of good intentions which miscarry or are frustrated. It is made, not usually by evil men knowing themselves to be wrong, but is the outcome of policies pursued by good men usually passionately convinced that they are right.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

War, World, Peace, Passion

“Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto’s depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

How—and How Not—to Love Mankind.
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Love, Women, People, Books

“Let us contemplate two epochal events in the long human story. One is the annunciation of the unity of God at Mt. Sinai. That same God was said to have made man, alone among living beings, in His image. Implicit in the unity of God was the corresponding unity of the human race. But it was only after more than three thousand years, that the Declaration of this unity was made in Philadelphia. One need not believe in direct divine intervention to think that it has been the peculiar mission of the American people to testify to the unity on earth of God, and of man. Such testimony could take no more evident form than in the denunciation of chattel slavery in the founding itself. That denunciation is prominent beyond doubt or denial, in the documents of the founding. Men of reason can agree with men of faith, that neither God nor man could have devised a more dramatic event than our founding to demonstrate to the world the meaning inherent in this unity.”

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

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the Human Story

God, People, World, Faith

“The men of God are like fishes in the ocean; they pop up into view on the surface here and there and everywhere, as they please.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

As quoted in "A feather on the breath of God" by Nur Elmessiri in Al-Ahram Weekly Online Issue No. 385 (9 - 15 July 1998) http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/385/cu2.htm

God, Fish

“I asked for 11 men and I asked for 5 men as substitutes.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

1-Oct-2005, Radio Derby
No women allowed.

“One of the signs that enable us to recognize the few great men who have lived in the world is this: they are nearly always able to state in clear, simple and concise language what they want to convey to the world.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 6

World

“Do women avoid fields like engineering because of the tendency of male-dominated fields to discriminate against women? Probably not. Prior to the women's movement, engineering was no more male-dominated than medicine and law. And women have entered medicine and law by the droves. When women enter male-dominated fields, they tend to enter the more glamorous occupations. And the media reinforces this. There was L. A. Law, but no L. A. Engineering. ER doesn't mean Engineering Room. Women receive six layers of encouragement to enter fields involving engineering, computers, and math and science: first, better starting salaries than men's; second, special programs for girls in high school; third, female-only government scholarships; fourth, female-only corporate grants and scholarships; fifth, the advertising that reaches out to women to create a more female-supportive atmosphere; and sixth, special grants for science programs at leading women's colleges.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 25.

Women, School, Law, Girl

“We begin to wonder if it is due to the fact that we don't know enough. But it can't be that. Because in terms of accumulated knowledge we know more today than men have known in any period of human history. We have the facts at our disposal. We know more about mathematics, about science, about social science, and philosophy than we've ever known in any period of the world's history. So it can't be because we don't know enough. And then we wonder if it is due to the fact that our scientific genius lags behind. That is, if we have not made enough progress scientifically. Well then, it can't be that. For our scientific progress over the past years has been amazing.”

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

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)
Context: There is something wrong with our world, something fundamentally and basically wrong. I don't think we have to look too far to see that. I'm sure that most of you would agree with me in making that assertion. And when we stop to analyze the cause of our world's ills, many things come to mind. We begin to wonder if it is due to the fact that we don't know enough. But it can't be that. Because in terms of accumulated knowledge we know more today than men have known in any period of human history. We have the facts at our disposal. We know more about mathematics, about science, about social science, and philosophy than we've ever known in any period of the world's history. So it can't be because we don't know enough. And then we wonder if it is due to the fact that our scientific genius lags behind. That is, if we have not made enough progress scientifically. Well then, it can't be that. For our scientific progress over the past years has been amazing. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains, so that today it's possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in London, England. Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that. It can't be because man is stagnant in his scientific progress. Man's scientific genius has been amazing. I think we have to look much deeper than that if we are to find the real cause of man's problems and the real cause of the world's ills today. If we are to really find it I think we will have to look in the hearts and souls of men.

World, History, Mathematics, Knowledge

“It was recognized, and recognized fairly, that when you get large bodies of workmen together they cannot, nor is it fair to expect them to, negotiate individually against the more powerful management that controls large bodies of men; and so it was that, to secure effective freedom of contract, power was given for man to join himself to man for that very purpose of bettering his position. The trade union as we know it came into being to meet the new conditions of industry. It was essential then, and for that purpose it will continue to be essential. This country is the birthplace of that kind of combination—this country, which has been the birthplace of every effort to free mankind by legitimate and evolutionary means, and will continue to be so, long after the efforts of other and less happy countries have gone down in failure and disaster.”

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

Speech in Chippenham (12 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 161.
1926

Failure, Effort, Freedom, Country

“It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Being Hard Up".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

World

“These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, First Inaugural Address (1933)

“In the race of men is much greed and envy; but of truth, little.”

Lloyd Alexander The Chronicles of Prydain

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book IV: Taran Wanderer (1967), Chapter 8 (Morda)

Truth, Envy

“Why does a man refuse to believe? Because he has confidence in himself; because he has not a sense of his own sins; because he has not love in his heart to his Lord and Saviour. Unbelief men are responsible for. Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act — an act of the whole nature. Belief or unbelief is a test of a man's whole spiritual condition, just because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, and all, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 608.

Love, Confidence, Understanding, Nature

“The Modern Man or Nervous Wreck is the highest of all mammals because anyone can see that he is. There are about 2,000,000,000 Modern Men, or too many. The Modern Man's highly developed brain has made him what he is and you know what he is. [Footnote: It is because of his brain that he has risen above the animals. Guess which animals he has risen above. ]”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Modern Man
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Animals

“Why do the voters let all this happen? It is because Westerners like to be ‘good’ people and believe that their fellow men are equally good people. It is because they have humane values.” “It is because the moral and ethical values of Western man have made him helpless in the face of wickedness and immorality.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2006), translation published in the blog Multicultural Discourse in Finland and Sweden http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.ch/2006/08/multicultural-discourse-in-finland-and.html, August 30, 2006 <br class="br">2005-09

People

“It is a war of ideologies and struggle races. On one side stands National Socialism: ideology, founded on the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood. It is worth the world as we want to see: beautiful, orderly, fair, socially, a world that may be, still suffers some flaws, but overall a happy, beautiful world filled with culture, which is precisely Germany. On the other side stands the 180 millionth people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself. These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of: having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world. When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1,000 years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Heinrich Himmler speaking in Stettin to soldiers of the SS (13 July 1941)
1940s

War, People, World, Religion

“In concluding let me say that we are now but on the threshold of the coming era of true cooperation. The time is fast going by for the great personal or individual achievement of any one man standing alone and without the help of those around him. And the time is coming when all great things will be done by the cooperation of many men in which each man performs that function for which he is best suited, each man preserves his individuality and is supreme in his particular function, and each man at the same time loses none of his originality and proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work harmoniously with many other men.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

F.W. Taylor (1906). " On the Art of Cutting Metals https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015023119582;view=2up;seq=64," Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Vol. XXVIII, 1906, pp. 31–350.

Time, Help, Personality

“Pride is a powerful force. The pride that kept so many men in California. They want to go home. But I can't go until I've got something to prove my success. They've been reading about success back home. I know, says the miner, how many people are failing. Failure is the most common fact of life in California. They don't know that. How can I go home a failure, when they expect me to come home a success? So they stay.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

On the Predicament of the Miners
The West (1996)

Life, People, Home, Failure

“Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 117

Business

“We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country… That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

The War You Don't See, ITV1 (UK), Tuesday 14 December 2010

Women, War, Children, People

“Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between the sexual impulse in men and women. Her need is for a lover, a protector, a father for her children. His desire is for mastery, conquest, to be allowed to use her body for his own satisfaction. He feels like a bee, burying itself in a flower, apparently doing nothing for the flower but taking its sweetness. If he loves her, then his desire is mixed with a kind of pity.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

L'amour: The Ways of Love (1970)

Love, Women, Children, Feeling

“I have always felt that humor was a wonderful vehicle to let us become connected with each other and ourselves… I try to portray the similarities and polarities in men and women, so that we can acknowledge and embrace our collective consciousness.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

As quoted in Variety magazine (2003)

Women

“The routine in the gallery seemed eternal. The artists ate a skimpy breakfast, worked from seven in the morning until noon, ate lunch when lunch was available, exercised by shift in the courtyard below, worked again till six, ate dinner, and worked from seven until eight-thirty. The gallery housed writers, artists, and a few musicians. Sexes were segregated. Every two weeks the men and women were allowed to mix indiscriminately. Any children born were immediately put in the outside government nurseries where they were brought up as workers, beginning in the fields or chemical gardens at the age of six.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Rebellers (1963), p. 9

Women, Children, Age, Sex

“The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Quoted in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), by Florence Emily Hardy, ch. 17, p. 212

Age, Dependency, Personality

“History is one long record of like illustrations. Must our modern civilisation with all its teeming wonders come to a like end? We are reproducing in faithful detail every cause which led to the downfall of the civilisations of other days—Imperialism, taking tribute from conquered races, the accumulation of great fortunes, the development of a population which owns no property, and is always in poverty. Land has gone out of cultivation and physical deterioration is an alarming fact. An so we Socialists say the system which is producing these results must not be allowed to continue. A system which has robbed religion of its saviour, destroyed handicraft, which awards the palm of success to the unscrupulous, corrupts the press, turns pure women on the streetsm and upright men into mean-spirited time-servers, cannot continue. In the end it is bound to work its own overthrow. Socialism with its promise of freedom, its larger hope for humanity, its triumph of peace over war, its binding of the races of the earth into one all-embracing brotherhood, must prevail. Capitalism is the creed of the dying present; socialism throbs with the life of the days that are to be. It has claimed its martyrs in the past, is claiming them now, will claim them still; but what then? Better to "rebel and die in the twenty worlds sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life."”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), p. 103–104

Life, Women, War, World

“The natives grieve
When the white men leave
Their huts.
Because they're obviously,
Definitely
Nuts.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1930)

“We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, Suicide of a Superpower (2011)

Religion, Heart

“But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you — the social reformer — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.”

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)

“We call the wise age that in which men had a wonderful knowledge of science which we recognize without fail by certain signs, although without knowing who they were, or in what place, or when. …It has become a matter of common usage to call the barbarous age that time which extends from about 900 or a thousand years up to about 150 years past, since men were for 700 or 800 years in the condition of imbeciles without the practice of letters or sciences—which condition had its origin in the burning of books through troubles, wars, and destructions; afterwards affairs could, with a great deal of labor, be restored, or almost restored, to their former state; but although the afore-mentioned preceding times could call themselves a wise age in respect to the barbarous age just mentioned, nevertheless we have not consented to this definition of such a wise age, since both taken together are nothing but a true barbarous age in comparison to that unknown time at which we state that it [i. e., the wise age] was, without any doubt, in existence.”

Simon Stevin (1548–1620) Flemish scientist, mathematician and military engineer

Géographie, in Les Oeuvres Mathématiques de Simon Stevin de Bruges (1634) ed. Girard, p. 106-108, as quoted by Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968)

War, Books, Age, Knowledge

“The highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.”

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

Bk. III, ch. 3.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“A young woman can live off the folly of men; a man of any age can live off the folly of women.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Women, Age

“Is it a cosmic law, d'you think, that conceited men's hats are always too small?”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

7. "The Old-fashioned Apache"
Trent Intervenes (1938)

Law, Thinking

“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask "why not?"”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Speech delivered to the Dail (Parliament of Ireland) (28 June 1963)
1963

World, Dreams, Problem, Reality

“Men will not commonly steal women that are nothing worth.”

Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet (1554–1625) English politician

Bruton v. Morris (1614), Lord Hobart's Rep. 182.

Women

“The political freedom of conscience and of the press, so far from being as it is commonly supposed an extension, is a new case of the limitation of rights and discretion. Conscience and the press ought to be unrestrained, not because men have a right to deviate from the exact line that duty prescribes, but because society, the aggregate of individuals, has no right to assume the prerogative of an infallible judge, and to undertake authoritatively to prescribe to its members in matters of pure speculation.”

William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist

Principles of Society, The Rights of Man
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Freedom

“That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 26

Sex, Nature

“The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Animals

“In the old days, the navigators used magic to make themselves strong, but now, nothing; they just pray. Before they leave and at sea, they pray. But I, I make myself strong by thinking—just by thinking! I make myself strong because I despise cowardice. Too many men are afraid of the sea. But I am a navigator.”

Mau Piailug (1932–2010) Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal and a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wa…

The Last Navigator (1987)

Thinking, Strong, Sea

“Three hundred men hastened forth, wearing gold torques, defending the land – and there was slaughter. Though they were slain they slew, and they shall be honoured to the end of the world; and of all us kinsmen who went, alas, but for one man none escaped.”

Aneirin book Y Gododdin

Stanza B8, p. 101.
Y Gododdin

World

“Now there was one of these Essens, whose name was Manahem, who had this testimony, that he not only conducted his life after an excellent manner, but had the foreknowledge of future events given him by God also. This man once saw Herod when he was a child, and going to school, and saluted him as king of the Jews; but he, thinking that either he did not know him, or that he was in jest, put him in mind that he was but a private man; but Manahem smiled to himself, and clapped him on his backside with his hand, and said," However that be, thou wilt be king, and wilt begin thy reign happily, for God finds thee worthy of it. And do thou remember the blows that Manahem hath given thee, as being a signal of the change of thy fortune. And truly this will be the best reasoning for thee, that thou love justice [towards men], and piety towards God, and clemency towards thy citizens; yet do I know how thy whole conduct will be, that thou wilt not be such a one, for thou wilt excel all men in happiness, and obtain an everlasting reputation, but wilt forget piety and righteousness; and these crimes will not be concealed from God, at the conclusion of thy life, when thou wilt find that he will be mindful of them, and punish time for them." Now at that time Herod did not at all attend to what Manahem said, as having no hopes of such advancement; but a little afterward, when he was so fortunate as to be advanced to the dignity of king, and was in the height of his dominion, he sent for Manahem, and asked him how long he should reign. Manahem did not tell him the full length of his reign; wherefore, upon that silence of his, he asked him further, whether he should reign ten years or not? He replied, "Yes, twenty, nay, thirty years;" but did not assign the just determinate limit of his reign. Herod was satisfied with these replies, and gave Manahem his hand, and dismissed him; and from that time he continued to honor all the Essens. We have thought it proper to relate these facts to our readers, how strange soever they be, and to declare what hath happened among us, because many of these Essens have, by their excellent virtue, been thought worthy of this knowledge of Divine revelations.”

Josephus on the Essenes

AJ 15.11.4-5
Antiquities of the Jews

Love, Life, God, School

“And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit,
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament
They seek so many new; then see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

An Anatomy of the World, The First Anniversary

World, Sun

“It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another but from God only”

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

1810s
Source: A Vision of the Last Judgment

God, Angels

“To reconcile Despotism with Freedom:—well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way;—and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

God, Law, Way, Courage

“The road to Hades is easy to travel; at any rate men pass away with their eyes shut.”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, iv. 49.

Travel

“Notwithstanding the hope that my friend [Cobden], who has just addressed you, has expressed, that it may not become a war of classes, I am not sure that it has not already become such, and I doubt whether it can have any other character. I believe this to be a movement of the commercial and industrial classes against the Lords and great proprietors of the soil…Since the time when we first came to London to ask the attention of Parliament to the question of the Corn Law, two millions of human beings have been added to the population of the United Kingdom…I see them now in my mind's eye ranged before me, old men and young children, all looking to the Government for bread; some endeavouring to resist the stroke of famine, clamorous and turbulent, but still arguing with us; some dying mute and uncomplaining. Multitudes have died of hunger in the United Kingdom since we first asked the Government to repeal the Corn Law, and although the great and powerful may not regard those who suffer mutely and die in silence, yet the recording angel will note down their patient endurance and the heavy guilt of those by whom they have been sacrificed…”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Covent Garden (19 December 1845), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 141-142.
1840s

Hunger, War, Children, Law

“When people ask me if the division between parties of the right and parties of the left, men of the right and men of the left, still makes sense, the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a man of the left.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

Statement of 1931, as quoted by Marcel Gauchet, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1 - Conflicts and Divisions, edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman, p. 266 ISBN 9780231084048

People, Question, Sense, Personality

“And however one's mind may be elevated, and kept us to what is excellent, by the works of the Great Masters — still Nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all originally must spring — and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature he must soon form a manner, & be reduced to the same deplorable situation as the French painter mentioned by Sir J. Reynolds, who told him that he had long ceased to look at nature for she only put him out.For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind — but have neither endeavoured to make my performances look as if really executed by other men….. There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to common-place people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

3 quotes in Constable's letter to John Dunthorne (29 May 1802), from John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), part 2, pp. 31-32
1800s - 1810s

People, Truth, Spring, Nature

“Depraved custom is just a kind of general pestilence in which men perish not the less that they fall in a crowd.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Prefatory Address, p. 23
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“If I have done anything for the colored people, it is in a great measure due to my having had the good-fortune, when I escaped from slavery, to become acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison, and with Wendell Phillips, and with our friend Oliver Johnson, and with Dr. Bowditch. The home of Dr. Bowditch, I may say, gave me the first shelter I received in this city. I have often been asked where I got my education. I have answered, from the Massachusetts Abolition University, Mr. Garrison, president… I meet with colored men on all sides smoking and sometimes drinking. That is not the way to rise in the world. For my own part, I neither smoke, nor chew tobacco nor take snuff, nor drink whiskey; and I should be delighted if I could make the same statement with regard to my whole people.”

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

Speech at the Wendell Phillips Club http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/ (11 September 1886). <br class="br">1880s

People, World, Education, Color

“What's wrong with musicals now is all the gifted men who've died of AIDS—who would otherwise be here today creating great theater.”

Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) American actress

Reported in Boze Hadleigh, (2007) Broadway Babylon: Glamour, Glitz, and Gossip on the Great White Way, Back Stage Books, ISBN 0823088308, p. 95.
Attributed

Music

“The essence of motherhood is not restricted to women who have given birth; it is a principle inherent in both women and men. It is an attitude of the mind. It is love — and that love is the very breath of life. No one would say, ‘I will breathe only when I am with my family and friends; I won’t breathe in front of my enemies.’ Similarly, for those in whom motherhood has awakened, love and compassion towards everyone is as much part of their being as breathing.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Awakening of Universal Motherhood (2002)

Love, Life, Women, Family

“But the main argument on which they rely is that of economy: for they know that they will sooner gain their end by appealing to men’s pockets, in which they have generally something of their own, than to their heads, which contain for the most part little but borrowed or stolen property.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 12

Parting

“Men have been Laughed out of Faults which a Sermon could not reform.”

Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) (1694–1746) Irish philosopher

The Dublin Weekly Journal, No. 12 (June 19, 1725)

“The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men--were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.”

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

Town Crier http://books.google.com/books?ei=65MyT4yGB6bJ0QGg9p3mBw&id=GqUOAQAAMAAJ&q=&quot;The+fact+that+boys+are+allowed+to+exist+at+all+is+evidence+of+a+remarkable+Christian+forbearance+among+men+were+it+not+for+a+mawkish+humani-tarianism+coupled+with+imperfect+digestive+powers+we+should+devour+our+young+as+Nature+intended&quot;&pg=PA74#v=onepage column in the San Francisco News-Letter (c. 1870)

Boy, Nature

“[I]f we lose our chance now…that chance will not return either to us or to our children. The memories of the last War will grow dim. The world will get back into the old rut, familiar professions and piety about peace will again soothe us to sleep, and the various countries will once more base their security upon military preparation. So they will all, in the end, find themselves drifting hopelessly upon those currents that make for war. … And remember what the next war will be like. The old lines which divide combatants from non-combatants, the weak and the diseased from the strong and the robust, men from women and children, will all be obliterated and civilization itself assailed, and from sea and sky will be brought to a heap of ruins.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester (24 May 1929), quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Metro, 1997), p. 487
1920s

Women, War, Children, World

“My song shall spread where ever there are men,
If wit and art will so much guide my pen.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Cantando espalharei por toda parte,
Se a tanto me ajudar o engenho e arte.

Stanza 2, lines 7–8 (tr. Richard Fanshawe, 1655)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I

Art

“The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), p. 1278

Problem

“If we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men, that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

History, Effort, Loss, Reading

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

execution wall
As quoted in The Cuban Revolution : Years of Promise (2005) by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay, p. 57, citing "Che Guevara: Assassin and Bumbler" by Humberto Fontova from Mensnewsdaily.com, 2 March 2004; Fontava does not identify a source for Guevara's statement.
Disputed

Hate, Motivation

“Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today … The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

Vol. I, Ch. 24 : "The Fixed Period'".
The Life of Sir William Osler (1925)

Age, World, Art, Literature

“There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell... When the king decreed that the people of Iceland were to relinquish all of their brass and copper so that Copenhagen could be rebuilt following the war, men were sent to fetch the ancient bell at Þingvellir by Öxará.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

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

War, People, Books, Time

“A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 29

Family, Nature, Problem, Thinking

“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal — there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J. P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 2, ch. 20
Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Stupidity, Way, Country

“When the mind was disgusted with the ways of the world, when obstructions were feared in the path of duty, when people became excited and lost their reason, when friends lost their spirit and suffered inner disquiet on any account, [Sastry used to recollect these Slokas. Tulya nindastuti] – equal and unmoved by praise or insult - is an injunction which ought to guide our public men…”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

The Gita for Every Man

People, World, Fear, Way

“Men are, in fact, either sustained by organization or they sustain organization.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter VIII, Section 5, p. 96

“But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity;
Her citizens, imperial spirits,
Rule the present from the past,
On all this world of men inherits
Their seal is set.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 696-703

War, World, Past, Sea

“Women bear Crosses better than Men do, but bear Surprizes – worse.”

Hester Thrale (1741–1821) Welsh author and salon-holder

Letter to Sir James Fellowes, November 6, 1817; The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784-1821 (2002) vol. 6, p. 130.

Women

“All men strive and hope for nothing other than eternal life in their human nature. For this they instituted purgations of souls and sacred rites, in order to be better adapted in their nature to that eternal life.”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)

Life, Hope, Soul, Nature

“The intimate coupling of two men or two women is not marriage. It is a pale and misshapen counterfeit that will only serve to empty marriage of its meaning and destroy the institution that is the keystone in the arch of civilization … Marriage is the sine qua non for healthy children and a stable society. It is 'fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race'…”

James Kennedy (televangelist) (1930–2007) American evangelist

Kennedy Calls for Constitutional "Firewall" to Protect Marriage http://www.reclaimamerica.org/PAGES/News/news.aspx?story=1460 Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, November 19, 2003

Women, Marriage, Children

“Thus it must be admitted that in the economic sphere, from the start, in all branches men are not of equal value or of equal importance. And once this is admitted it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. It is absurd to build up economic life on the conceptions of achievement, of the value of personality, and therefore in practice the authority of personality, but in the political sphere to deny the authority of personality and to thrust into this place the law of the greater number — democracy.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech to the Industry Club (21 January 1932) as quoted in The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922 – August 1939 (1994) by Norman Hepburn Baynes, Oxford University Press, p.787
1930s

Life, Law, Democracy, Personality

“Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style.”

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

Source: Epigrams, p. 345

Fools, Sense

“These — lowliness, meekness, long-suffering, loving forbearance — quiet, unpretending, unshowy virtues, are amongst the best means for promoting true unity in the church of God. Who is the most useful Christian? Not as a rule he who has the most transcendent genius, brilliant talents, and commanding eloquence, but he who has the most of this quiet, loving, forbearing spirit. The world may do without its Niagara, whose thundering roar and majestic rush excite the highest amazement of mankind, but it cannot spare the thousand rivulets that glide unseen and unheard every moment through the earth, imparting life, and verdure, and beauty wherever they go. And so the church may do without its men of splendid abilities, but it cannot do without its men of tender, loving, forbearing souls.”

David Thomas (born 1813) (1813–1894) 19th-century Welsh preacher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 105.

Love, Life, God, World

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. VI: Of the Training of Black Men

Life, Women, Truth, Smile

“In brief, when women batter, men’s first priority is to support the women and help them change; when men batter, women’s first priority is to escape the men and put them in prison.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Women, Support, Change, Help

“They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.”

Kim Stanley Robinson (1952) American science fiction writer

thoughts of Frank Chalmers
Red Mars (1992)

Women, Stupidity, Education, Help

“What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization but an international conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 47

Women, World, Knowledge, Maternity

“No martyr ever went the way of duty, and felt the shadow of death upon it. The shadow of death is darkest in the valley, which men walk in easily, and is never felt at all on a steep place, like Calvary. Truth is everlasting, and so is every lover of it; and so he feels himself almost always.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 339.

Death, Truth, Way, Feeling

“And if so many brave men and women could sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights, then surely we can do our parts as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights. Surely we can get to the polls on an election day and make our voices heard.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

Women, Exercises, Democracy, Parting

“It is much more trying to be continually tormented by evil men than by devils.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

Evil

““The rules that society chooses to live by have always struck me as especially fascinating,” she said. “There are things one can do but not talk about, and there are things one can talk about but not do. There are things—not apparently gender-related—that men can do, but not women, and there are things women can do, but not men. We live in an invisible maze, and we have all learned where to turn and when, so as to find our way through.”
“Some of the rules are good, Mary, and many are necessary,” Lord Darcy said mildly.
“You misunderstood me, my dear,” Mary of Cumberland told him. “As in magic, where there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or the spell won’t work; so in society there are absolutely essential words to say and gestures to make or we won’t understand each other or trust each other, and it will all come tumbling down around us. The problem is that the rules of society, unlike magic, have never been formalized mathematically, and we don’t know which words are essential to the spell and which are just silly words.””

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 132)

Women, Way, Mathematics, Understanding

“I believe anyone who supports feminism is anti-woman even if they are not conscious of it. Feminism and "female empowerment" has led to a generation of the least happy women in history. They are lost and are being told that they are the EXACT same as men and should be able to compete at the same level in all fields of life. How sad to always fail at something you are supposed to be equal in. How sad to be led astray to never get married then hit a wall where you wish for nothing more than a family but cannot have it… simply because you bought into this false notion of feminism that promised happiness and fulfillment. The reality is women are biologically different and different things will make them happy.”

Lauren Southern (1995) Canadian libertarian commentator

AMA on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/4zlf89/lauren_southern_ama/d6wtbfx/ (August 25, 2016)

Life, Women, Sadness, Family

“It is not unlike men to leave.”

Matthew Good (1971) Canadian singer-songwriter

At Last There is Nothing Left to Say

“Elin wondered, sitting in the sweat bath, what that had to do with passion or desire, and decided – nothing. It was justification. They had murdered the men and must prove, on the helpless bodies of the women, that they were truly stronger. Prove it to exhaustion… not even pleasure was in it for them”

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Devoted

Women, Pleasure, Passion

“You can see, therefore, that as a life story mine does not matter much. As a means, however, of proving certain facts which I know to be essential to the future happiness and progress of humanity—the fact of the Masters, the unfolding future for which the world war (just ended) is but a preparatory stage, and the possibility of telepathic and direct spiritual contacts and knowledge—what I say may prove to be of service. Many isolated mystics, disciples and aspiring men and women down the ages have known all these things. The time has now come when the masses of men everywhere must know them too.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

The Introduction
The Unfinished Autobiography (1951)

Life, Women, War, Age

“And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Third Part, Chapter 36, p. 226 (See also: Glossolalia)
Leviathan (1651)

Sense, Time, Madness

“The bridge was not of such great importance or social significance, but it was symbolical that Labour was capable of decision, that the machinery of democratic public administration would work if the men and women in charge were determined that it should work.”

Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) British Labour politician

The Times, 10 December 1934.
Explaining his decision to personally begin the dismantling of the old Waterloo Bridge; the government had refused to allow the council to build a replacement so Morrison and his allies forced the issue by breaking up the existing bridge.

Women, Decision

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

C. Wright Mills book White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

Life, Books, Family, Law

“There are men and gods, and beings like Pythagoras.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

Of himself, as quoted in A History of Western Philosophy (1945) by Bertrand Russell

God

Quotes about men page 75

Quotes about men
page 75