Quotes about men
page 89

Walter Dill Scott photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Jacques Maritain photo

“There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

True Humanism (1938), p. xi.

Paul Blobel photo
Camille Paglia photo

“Success in the sociologists' aim might lead, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, to "systems so perfect that no one would need to be good." This view forgets that men long ago committed themselves to the endeavor to control their own collective behavior, not only in the ways sanctioned by the churches but in others, by making it to men's interest to do good. And they have increasingly based the endeavor on an understanding of natural laws of human behavior, those of economics, for example. So that the question is not: Shall this kind of control be undertaken? but: Where shall it stop? A sociologist might also argue that his religious critics have more faith in him than in their own doctrine, the doctrine that man is infinitely tough and resourceful and is not easily cheated of his freedom to sin. What God has given no man can take away, certainly no sociologist. More seriously, he might argue that the social sciences are not in train to eliminate morality but to make greater demands of it. A sociology that shows us unsuspected or not hitherto understood ways in which men are bound up with one another invites more refined answers to the question: "Am I my brother's keeper?"”

George C. Homans (1910–1989) American sociologist

George C. Homans (1956), "Giving a dog a bad name." in: The Listener, Vol. 56. p. 233; Reprinted in: George C. Homans (1962), Sentiments & activities; essays in social science https://archive.org/details/sentimentsactivi00homa, p. 117-8

David Lloyd George photo
Brigham Young photo
Hugh MacDiarmid photo

“I'll ha'e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the curst conceit o' bein' richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.”

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) Scottish poet, pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve

Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), II.141-4
These lines are on MacDiarmid's tombstone

“Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them.”

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

The Corruptions of Our Time, p. 249
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“What reason had he then for endeavouring, with such bitter hostility, to force me into the senate yesterday? Was I the only person who was absent? Have you not repeatedly had thinner houses than yesterday? Or was a matter of such importance under discussion, that it was desirable for even sick men to be brought down? Hannibal, I suppose, was at the gates, or there was to be a debate about peace with Pyrrhus; on which occasion it is related that even the great Appius, old and blind as he was, was brought down to the senate-house.”
Quid tandem erat causae, cur in senatum hesterno die tam acerbe cogerer? Solusne aberam, an non saepe minus frequentes fuistis, an ea res agebatur, ut etiam aegrotos deferri oporteret? Hannibal, credo, erat ad portas, aut de Pyrrhi pace agebatur, ad quam causam etiam Appium illum et caecum et senem delatum esse memoriae proditum est.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Philippica I; English translation by C. D. Yonge
Potentially the origin of the phrase "Hannibal ad portas" (Hannibal at the gates)
Philippicae – Philippics (44 BC)

Robert A. Heinlein photo

“Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?”

Source: Farmer in the Sky (1950), Chapter 14, “Land of My Own” (p. 142)

Saddam Hussein photo

“SSA Piro asked Hussein why Iraq was the only country to applaud the 9/11 attack, which Hussein immediately denied.… Hussein stated that he wrote editorials against the attack, but also spoke of the cause which led men to commit these acts. The cause was never reviewed which could create such hatred to kill innocent people.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Conversation with FBI Senior Special Agent George L. Piro (28 June 2004); National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 279 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/index.htm.
Attributed

Bell Hooks photo
Brandon Sanderson photo
Qutb al-Din Aibak photo
Charles Henry Fowler photo
Claude Adrien Helvétius photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Bill Maher photo
Oliver Cromwell photo
Thomas Hobbes photo
Ernest Barnes photo
Kage Baker photo
Sarada Devi photo
Immanuel Wallerstein photo

“The past can be told as it truly is, not was. For recounting the past is a social act of the present done by men of the present and affecting the social system of the present.”

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) economic historian

Wallerstein (1974) The modern world system capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.

Stephen Colbert photo
Emil M. Cioran photo

“Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Tears and Saints (1937)

Immanuel Kant photo
Mahmud of Ghazni photo
Tryon Edwards photo
John Martin photo
Linus Torvalds photo

“Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it;)”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message, linux-kernel mailing list, IU, 1996-07-20, Torvalds, Linus, 2014-04-26 http://www.webcitation.org/6P8EBZqQX,
1990s, 1995-99

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Benito Mussolini photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“Do not only look
For gentlefolk in castles: everywhere,
In humble dwellings and in haylofts, too,
The hearts of men are often kind and true.”

Che non pur per cittadi e per castella,
Ma per tuguri ancora e per fenili
Spesso si trovan gli uomini gentili.
Canto XIV, stanza 62 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Warren Farrell photo
Gabriel García Márquez photo
Clement Attlee photo
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

“History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

As quoted in Essays on Freedom and Power, Introduction, p. xlvii (1949) https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Essays%20on%20Freedom%20and%20Power_3.pdf

John Selden photo

“The law against witches does not prove there be any; but it punishes the malice of those people that use such means to take away men's lives.”

John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law

Witches.
Table Talk (1689)

Max Born photo
Arthur Koestler photo
Ali Zayn al-Abidin photo
Edmund Burke photo
Susan Cain photo
Alberto Gonzales photo
Wallace Stevens photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5003. Tho' all Men were made of one Metal, yet they were not cast all in the same Mould.”

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

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

George Holyoake photo

“Moved by a generous eagerness to turn men's attention to the power which dwelt in circumstances, Mr. Owen devised the instructive phrase, that "man's character was formed for him and not by him." He used the unforgettable inference that "man is the creature of circumstances." The school of material improvers believed they could put in permanent force right circumstances. The great dogma was their charter of encouragement. To those who hated without thought It seemed a restrictive doctrine to be asked to admit that there were extenuating circumstances in the career of every rascal. To the clergy with whom censure was a profession, and who held that all sin was wilful, man being represented as the "creature of circumstances," appeared a denial of moral responsibility. When they were asked to direct hatred against error, and pity the erring — who had inherited so base a fortune of incapacity and condition — they were wroth exceedingly, and said it would be making a compromise with sin. The idea of the philosopher of circumstances was that the very murderer in his last cell had been born with a staple in his soul, to which the villainous conditions of his life had attached an unseen chain, which had drawn him to the gallows, and that the rope which was to hang him was but the visible part. Legislators since that day have come to admit that punishment is justifiable only as far as it has preventive influence. To use the great words of Hobbes, "Punishment regardeth not the past, only the future."”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

George Bird Evans photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
Charles Lindbergh photo
Aristides de Sousa Mendes photo

“Starting today I will obey my conscience. As a Christian I do not have the right to let these women and men die.”

Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885–1954) Portuguese diplomat

Quoted in Huffington Post, 18 April 2012 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louisphilippe-mendes/holocaust-remembrance-day_b_1434733.html

Charles Baudelaire photo

“Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient.”

A coup sûr, cet homme, tel que je l'ai dépeint, ce solitaire doué d'une imagination active, toujours voyageant à travers le grand désert d'hommes, a un but plus élevé que celui d'un pur flâneur, un but plus général, autre que le plaisir fugitif de la circonstance. Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernité; car il ne se présente pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idée en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de dégager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poétique dans l'historique, de tirer l'éternel du transitoire.
IV: "La modernité" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Modernit%C3%A9
Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Paolo Bacigalupi photo

“Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.”

Source: The Windup Girl (2009), p. 280

Anna Quindlen photo

“If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They'd be inexpensive, too.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

The New York Times. Living Out Loud, p. 31 (1988)

Charlotte Rampling photo
George S. Patton photo

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Though Patton commissioned this prayer and ordered 250,000 copies of it printed with his signature, it was actually composed by Chief Chaplain James H. O'Neill http://www.pattonhq.com/prayer.html Review of the News (6 October 1971)
Misattributed

Vātsyāyana photo
Henry Adams photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“Partly what you need to do is decide what your highest value is. It's the star. What are you aiming for? You can decide. But there are some criteria. It should be good for you in a way that facilitates your moving forward. Maybe it should be good for you in a way that's also good for your family, as well as for the larger community. It should cover the domain of life. There's constraints on what you should regard as a value, but within those constraints you have the choice. You have choice. The thing is that people will carry a heavy load if they get to pick the load. And they think, 'well, I won't carry any load.' Ok, fine, but then you'll be like the slead dog that has nothing to pull. You'll get bored. People are pack animals. They need to pull against a wait. And that's not true for everyone. It's not true for conscientious people. For the typical person, they'll eat themselves up unless they have a load. This is why there's such an opiate epidemic among so many dispossessed white, middle aged, unemployed men in the U. S. They lose their job, and then they're done. They despise themselves. They develop chronic pain syndromes and depression. And the chronic pain is treated with opiates. That's what we're doing. And you should watch when you talk to young men about responsibility. They're so thrilled about it. It just blows me away. Really?! That's what the counter-culture is? Grow up and do something useful. Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea. No one ever mentioned that before. Rights, rights, rights, rights. Jesus. It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man. That's where the meaning in life is.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Don DeLillo photo
George Sand photo

“In the stormy days of our youth, we imagine that solitude is a sure refuge from the assaults of life, a certain balm for the wounds of battle. This is a serious mistake, and experience teaches us that, if we cannot live in peace with our fellow-men, neither romantic raptures nor aesthetic enjoyment will ever fill the abyss gaping at the bottom of our hearts.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Dans les jours orageux de la jeunesse, on s'imagine que la solitude est le grand refuge contre les atteintes, le grand remède aux blessures du combat; c'est une grave erreur, et l'expérience de la vie nous apprend que, là ou l'on ne peut vivre en paix avec ses semblables, il n'est point d'admiration poétique ni de jouissances d'art capables de combler l'abîme qui se creuse au fond de l'âme.
Un Hiver à Majorque, pt. 3, ch. 5 (1855); Robert Graves (trans.) Winter in Majorca (Chicago: Academy Press, 1978) p. 165

Douglas MacArthur photo
Jeff Foxworthy photo
Statius photo

“So strange is Chance, so blind the purposes of men!”
Pro fors et caeca futuri mens hominum!

Source: Thebaid, Book V, Line 718 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax photo

“Nothing is less forgiven than setting Patterns Men have no mind to follow.”

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

Princes (their Rewards of Servants).
Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Political Thoughts and Reflections

Martin Farquhar Tupper photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.”

Le bonheur et le malheur des hommes ne dépend pas moins de leur humeur que de la fortune.
Maxim 61.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Norman Mailer photo
Henry George photo

“No amount of force will break an egg-shell if exerted on one side alone. So capital could not squeeze labor as long as labor was free to natural opportunities, and in a world where these natural materials and opportunities were as free to all as is the air to us, there could be no difficulty in finding employment, no willing hands conjoined with hungry stomachs, no tendency of wages toward the minimum on which the worker could barely live. In such a world we would no more think of thanking anybody for furnishing us employment than we here think of thanking anybody for furnishing us with appetites.
That the Creator might have put us in the kind of world I have sought to imagine, as readily as in this kind of a world, I have no doubt. Why he has not done so may, however, I think, be seen. That kind of a world would be best for fools. This is the best for men who will use the intelligence with which they have been gifted. Of this, however, I shall speak hereafter. What I am now trying to do by asking my readers to endeavor to imagine a world in which natural opportunities were "as free as air," is to show that the barrier which prevents labor from freely using land is the nether millstone against which labor is ground, the true cause of the difficulties which are apparent through the whole industrial organization.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 13 : Unemployed Labor

Franklin D. Roosevelt photo

“We know it because democracy alone, of all forms of government, enlists the full force of men's enlightened will.”

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

1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)

Priscilla Presley photo

“I don't think I'll ever find anyone I'll love as much as I loved Elvis. It's pointless trying to compare him to anyone. Yes, some men I've been with have mattered to me, but Elvis was my first love, he'll be my last.”

Priscilla Presley (1945) actress and businesswoman from the United States and former wife of Elvis Presley

On Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley is a hard act to follow for ex-wife Priscilla http://movies.ndtv.com/music/elvis-presley-is-a-hard-act-to-follow-for-ex-wife-priscilla-271404 24 September, 2012

Warren Farrell photo

“Adam Smith himself was under no allusion about the desire of individuals, particularly business men, to create privileged positions for themselves.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter IV, The Classical System, p. 154

Walter Dill Scott photo
David D. Levine photo
John Newton photo
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi photo
Epifanio de los Santos photo
Jacques Maritain photo

“A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Christianity and Democracy (1943), p. 43.

G. K. Chesterton photo

“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.”

The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Flying Stars
The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

Abba Eban photo

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Abba Eban (1915–2002) Israeli diplomat and politician

Speech in London (16 December 1970); as quoted in The Times [London] (17 December 1970) and in Great Jewish Quotations (1996) by Alfred J. Kolatch, p. 115.

Keshub Chunder Sen photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“3968. Proud Men can't bear with Pride in others.”

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

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

Aron Ra photo
Nathanael Greene photo
C. Wright Mills photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Anthony Trollope photo
Frances Kellor photo