Foreword http://www.bartleby.com/55/100.html
1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913)
Context: We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard.
“He that holds fast the golden mean, 22
And lives contentedly between
The little and the great,
Feels not the wants that pinch the poor,
Nor plagues that haunt the rich man's door.”
Translation of Horace, book ii, Ode x.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
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William Cowper 174
(1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist 1731–1800Related quotes
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago
"Badlands"
Song lyrics, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978)
“If thou canst not hold the golden mean, say and do too little rather than too much.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 178
Explaining Jim Crow laws to his daughters, in The Luminous Darkness : A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (1989), p. 71
Treatise 3: “The Study of the Torah,” Chapter 1, Section 8, H. Russell, trans. (1983), p. 51
Mishneh Torah (c. 1180)
“Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments”
No. 163 (8 October 1751)
The Rambler (1750–1752)
Context: Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.
Interview http://www.rationalrevolution.net/special/library/cc835_44.htm with H. G. Wells (September 1937)
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews
Variant: Which means Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: My intellect tells me: "Tell the truth at any cost." The Little Man in me says: "It is stupid to expose oneself to the little man, to put oneself at his mercy. The Little Man does not want to hear the truth about himself. He does not want the great responsibility which is his. He wants to remain a Little Man. He wants to remain a Little Man, or wants to become a little great man. He wants to become rich, or a party leader, or commander of a legion, or secretary of the society for the abolition of vice. But he does not want to assume responsibility for his work..."
Source: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts