“A horse at the end of the race…A dog when the hunt is over…A bee with its honey stored…And a human being after helping others. They don't make a fuss about it. They just go on to something else, as the vine looks forward to bearing fruit again in season. We should be like that. Acting almost unconsciously.”

— Marcus Aurelius , book Meditations

Hays translation
V, 6
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V

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Marcus Aurelius 400

Emperor of Ancient Rome 121–180

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Love the One You're With

“The Jew alone regard his race as superior to humanity, and looks forward not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them all and to its final ascendancy under the leadership of a tribal Messiah.”

Goldwin Smith (1823–1910) British historian and journalist

Source: October 1881. See The Nineteenth Century — A monthly review, Volume 10 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=QYEPAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA813, edited by James Knowles, London, 1881.

“The English mind was like the London drawing room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie-dog, has the right to doubt; least of all the Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“Dogs and horses, for example, are naturally subservient to human beings. But no human being is naturally subservient to another human being. No human being has a right to rule another without the other's consent”

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

2000s, The Central Idea (2006)
Context: The equality of mankind is best understood in light of a two-fold inequality. The first is the inequality of mankind and of the subhuman classes of living beings that comprise the order of nature. Dogs and horses, for example, are naturally subservient to human beings. But no human being is naturally subservient to another human being. No human being has a right to rule another without the other's consent. The second is the inequality of man and God. As God's creatures, we owe unconditional obedience to His will. By that very fact however we do not owe such obedience to anyone else. Legitimate political authority—the right of one human being to require obedience of another human being—arises only from consent. The fundamental act of consent is, as the 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights states, "a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good." The "certain laws for the common good" have no other purpose but to preserve and protect the rights that each citizen possesses prior to government, rights with which he or she has been "endowed by their Creator." The rights that governments exist to secure are not the gift of government. They originate in God.

“Men, be vigilant!
Those are killers.
They don't care about introspection, still-lifes, structuralism, colours and sounds:
They kill.
They don't care about Chuang-tzu, Kafka, the unconscious and the subconscious, Breton and surrealism, Hamlet and "to be or not to be," they just don't care;
They kill.
They sweep on us as the twitter of birds greets the coming of dawn
Or during starlit and love-laden nights
Or when the sky is at its bluest
When gardens are fragrant with the scent of flowers
And the fruit sweet like human lips.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"The Enemy and Us", in Vietnam Courier (December 1972), quoted in Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War by Mary Hershberger (Syracuse University Press, 1998), ISBN 978-0815605171, p. 180