Quotes about man
page 23

“Something has risen up in this country as fatal in the political world as it has been in the landed world of Ireland—we have a great Parliamentary middleman. It is well known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party, and plunders the other, till, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries out, "Let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure."”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/apr/11/maynooth-college in the House of Commons (11 April 1845). 1840s

World, Question, Country

“The soul has a hidden abyss,
untouched by time and space,
which is far superior to anything
that gives life and movement to the body.
Into this noble and wondrous ground,
this secret realm,
there descends that bliss of which we have spoken.
Here the soul has its eternal abode.
Here a man becomes so still and essential,
so single-minded and withdrawn,
so raised up in purity,
and more and more removed from all things. . . .
This state of the soul cannot be compared to what it has been before,
for now it is granted to share in the divine life The soul has a hidden abyss, untouched by time and space…Here the soul has its eternal abode itself.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons

Life, Secret, Soul, Time

“Joy and happiness are the indicators of balance in a human machine, just as a change in the familiar hum in a mechanism immediately indicates an abnormalcy to the practiced ear of the mechanic. An inner joyousness, amounting to ecstasy, is the normal condition of the genius mind. Any lack of that joyousness develops body-destroying toxins. That inner ecstasy of the mind is the secret fountain of perpetual youth and strength in any man. He who finds it finds omnipotence and omniscience.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

Happiness, Secret, Youth, Change

“Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world and the most indecent newspapers.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) Source: Wilde, Oscar, (1891 / 1912) The Soul of Man Under Socialism, London, Arthur L. Humphreys. Retrieved from University of California Libraries Archive.org https://archive.org 13 February 2018 https://archive.org/details/soulofmanunderso00wildiala

World, Beauty, Freedom

“It's wrong to flog a man. It's against his being a man.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Billy Budd
Billy Budd (1962)

“A man should gather from the actions of the woman of what disposition she is, and in what way she likes to be enjoyed. A man during her monthly courses, a woman who has been lately confined, and fat woman should not be made to act the part of man.”

Vātsyāyana book Kama Sutra

Source: Kama Sutra, p. 50

Way, Parting

“Maybe I should try singing like a man.”

James Blunt (1974) English singer-songwriter

Speaking at the 2006 BRIT Awards. http://news.superiorpics.com/print/2006/02/16/blunt_and_martin_attack_critics_0211_6.html

Singing

“We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”

Pericles (-494–-429 BC) Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens

Pericles commenting the participation of Athenian citizens in politics, as quoted in Models of Democracy (2006) by David Held, Stanford University Press, p. 14. Book II, chapter 40.

Business

“First, I say, that woman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man, not to rule and command him. As St. Paul does reason in these words: "Man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. And man was not created for the cause of the woman, but the woman for the cause of man; and therefore ought the woman to have a power upon her head" [1 Cor. 11:8-10] (that is, a cover in sign of subjection). Of which words it is plain that the apostle means, that woman in her greatest perfection should have known that man was lord above her; and therefore that she should never have pretended any kind of superiority above him, no more than do the angels above God the Creator, or above Christ their head. [38] So I say, that in her greatest perfection, woman was created to be subject to man.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

God, Angels, Christ, Perfection

“Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he’s lost the battle. He had to sign a truce. America’s not supposed to sign a truce. She’s supposed to be bad. But she’s not bad any more. She’s bad as long as she can use her hydrogen bomb, but she can’t use hers for fear Russia might use hers. Russia can’t use hers, for fear that Sam might use his. So, both of them are weapon-less. They can’t use the weapon because each’s weapon nullifies the other’s. So the only place where action can take place is on the ground. And the white man can’t win another war fighting on the ground. Those days are over. The black man knows it, the brown man knows it, the red man knows it, and the yellow man knows it. So they engage him in guerrilla warfare. That’s not his style. You’ve got to have heart to be a guerrilla warrior, and he hasn’t got any heart.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)

War, Fear, Time, Heart

“Another illustration. When for the first time I met Mister Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, and would cause the man's death after a while. But you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a minute. But would you engraft the seeds of that wen on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. Those who think it right would consider the snake a jewel, and the wen an ornament.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Death, Men, Hope, Cars

“The Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy; twelve of which were slaveholding communities. We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slaveholding communities. It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil and that they placed a provision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source. This was the abolition of the slave trade. So general was conviction, the public determination, to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution, declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808. A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war. Now, if slavery had been a good thing, would the Fathers of the Republic have taken a step calculated to diminish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity? These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures… Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built…”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Speech at Lewistown, Illinois (1858)

Life, Men, War, Happiness

“He is truly a man who will not permit himself to be unduly elated when fortune’s breeze is favorable, or cast down when it is adverse.”
Is demum vir erit, cuius animum neque prosperae res flatu suo efferent nec adversae infringent

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Book XLV, sec. 8
History of Rome

“Logic only gives man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants.”

Tom Robbins book Another Roadside Attraction

Another Roadside Attraction (1971)

“A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. I, lines 545–550.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)
Variant: A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.

“The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Source: Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782), Books VIII-XII, IX

Happiness, Heart

“Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Max Müller, India: What Can India Teach Us? (1883), p. 15 http://books.google.com/books?id=pIVDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA15&dq=%22most+valuable+and+most+instructive+materials+in+the+history+of+man+are+treasured+up+in+India%22 Misattributed

History

“Only a little while ago the oceans seemed unassailable—too big and stable to be hurt by man, too teeming with life to let him ever go hungry. But now we know better. Suddenly, even the myriad creatures of the sea are suffering from human intemperance. The offal of cities circles the world in global currents; beaches are strewn with the cast-off artifacts of men two thousand miles away.”

Archie Carr (1909–1987) American university professor, zoologist, herpetologist, conservationist

[Great reptiles, great enigmas, March 1972, 24–34, http://www.seaturtle.org/PDF/CarrA_1972_Audubon.pdf] (quote from p. 24)

Life, Men, World, Suffering

“Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address at Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1912)

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Way, Nature

“But here's an object more of dread
Than ought the grave contains —
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.

Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright,
A fortune-favored child —
Now locked for aye, in mental night,
A haggard mad-man wild.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Canto II
1840s, My Childhood's Home I See Again (1844 - 1846)

Life, Madness, Night

“It is the study of the Chemists to liberate that unsensual truth from its fetters in things of sense, for through it the heavenly powers are persued with subtle understanding…. Knowledge is the sure and undoubted resolution by experiment of all opinions concerning the truth…. Experiment is manifest demonstration of the truth, and resolution the putting away of doubt. We cannot be resolved of any doubt save by experiment, and therefore is no better way to make it than on ourselves. Let us therefore verify what we have said above concerning the truth, beginning with ourselves. We have said that piety consists in knowledge of ourselves, and hence it is said that we make philosophical knowledge begin from this also. But no man can know himself unless he know what and not who he is, on whom he depends and whose he is (for by the law of truth no one belongs to himself, and to what end he was made. With this knowledge piety begins, which is concerned with two things, namely, with the Creator and the creature that is made like unto him. For it is impossible for the creature to know himself of himself, unless he first know his Creator…. No one can better know the Creator, than the workman is known by his work.”

Gerhard Dorn (1530–1584) alchemist, bibliophile, philosopher, physician, translator

Theatrum Chemicum Volume 1 phil. med.

Truth, Law, Way, Understanding

“The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for a moment — an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

86
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

World, Motivation, Knowledge

“Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present…This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

The Historian's Craft, pg.43

Truth, Understanding, Past

“Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored — contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man — such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care — such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance — such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Cooper Union speech (1860)

Men, Search, Question, Thinking

“I have never believed that the securing of material resources ought to form the central interest of human life—but have instead maintained that personality is an independent flowering of the intellect and emotions wholly apart from the struggle for existence. Formerly I accepted the archaic dictum that only a few can be relieved of the engulfing waste of the material struggle in its bitterest form—a dictum which is, of course, true in an agricultural age having scanty resources. Therefore I adopted an aristocratic attitude; regretfully arguing that life, in any degree of fulness, is only for the fortunate few whose ancestors' prowess has given them economic security and leisure. But I did not take the bourgeois position of praising struggle for its own sake. While recognising certain worthy qualities brought out by it, I was too much impressed by its stultifying attributes to regard it as other than a necessary evil. In my opinion, only the leisured aristocrat really had a chance at adequate life—nor did I despise him because he was not forced to struggle. Instead, I was sorry that so few could share his good fortune. Too much human energy was wasted in the mere scramble for food and shelter. The condition was tolerable only because inevitable in yesterday's world of scanty resources. Millions of men must go to waste in order that a few might really live. Still—if those few were not upheld, no high culture would ever be built up. I never had any use for the American pioneer's worship of work and self-reliance for their own sakes. These things are necessary in their place, but not ends in themselves—and any attempt to make them ends in themselves is essentially uncivilised. Thus I have no fundamental meeting-ground with the rugged Yankee individualist. I represent rather the mood of the agrarian feudalism which preceded the pioneering and capitalistic phases. My ideal of life is nothing material or quantitative, but simply the security and leisure necessary for the maximum flowering of the human spirit.... Well—so much for the past. Now we live in an age of easy abundance which makes possible the fulfilment of all moderate human wants through a relatively slight amount of labour. What shall be the result? Shall we still make resources prohibitively hard to get when there is really a plethora of them? Shall we allow antique notions of allocation—"property," etc.—to interfere with the rational distribution of this abundant stock of resources among all those who require them? Shall we value hardship and anxiety and uncertainty so fatuously as to impose these evils artificially on people who do not need to bear them, through the perpetuation of a set of now irrelevant and inapplicable rules of allocation? What reasonable objection is there to an intelligent centralised control of resources whose primary object shall be the elimination of want in every quarter—a thing possible without removing comfortable living from any one now enjoying it? To call the allocation of resources something "uncontrollable" by man—and in an age when virtually all natural forces are harnessed and utilised—is simply infantile. It is simply that those who now have the lion's share don't want any fresh or rational allocation. It is needless to say that no sober thinker envisages a workless equalitarian paradise. Much work remains, and human capacities differ. High-grade service must still receive greater rewards than low-grade service. But amidst the present abundance of goods and minimisation of possible work, there must be a fair and all-inclusive allocation of the chances to perform work and secure rewards. When society can't give a man work, it must keep him comfortable without it; but it must give him work if it can, and must compel him to perform it when it is needed. This does not involve interference with personal life and habits (contrary to what some reactionaries say), nor is the absence of insecurity anything to deplore.... But of course the real need of change comes not from the mere fact of abundant resources, but from the growth of conditions making it impossible for millions to have any chance of getting any resources under the present outworn set of artificial rules. This development is no myth. Machines had displaced 900,000 men in the U. S. before the crash of '29, and no conceivable regime of "prosperity" (where by a few people will have abundant and flexible resources and successfully exchange them among one another) will ever make it possible to avoid the permanent presence of millions of unemployed, so long as old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism is adhered to.... And so I have readjusted my ideas. … I have gone almost reluctantly—step by step, as pressed by facts too insistent to deny—and am still quite as remote from Belknap's naive Marxism as I am from the equally naive Republican orthodoxy I have left behind. I am as set as ever against any cultural upheaval—and believe that nothing of the kind is necessary in order to achieve a new and feasible economic equilibrium. The best of culture has always been non-economic.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Hitherto it has grown out of the secure, non-struggling life of the aristocrat. In future it may be expected to grow out of the secure and not-so-struggling life of whatever citizens are personally able to develop it. There need be no attempt to drag culture down to the level of crude minds. That, indeed, would be something to fight tooth and nail! With economic opportunities artificially regulated, we may well let other interests follow a natural course. Inherent differences in people and in tastes will create different social-cultural classes as in the past—although the relation of these classes to the holding of material resources will be less fixed than in the capitalistic age now closing. All this, of course, is directly contrary to Belknap's rampant Stalinism—but I'm telling you I'm no bolshevik! I am for the preservation of all values worth preserving—and for the maintenance of complete cultural continuity with the Western-European mainstream. Don't fancy that the dethronement of certain purely economic concepts means an abrupt break in that stream. Rather does it mean a return to art impulses typically aristocratic (that is, disinterested, leisurely, non-ulterior) rather than bourgeois.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 60-64
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, People, Age

“I have sometimes amused myself by endeavouring to fancy what would be the fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race. Of course he would be conscious of his superiority; nor could he (if otherwise constituted as man is) help manifesting his consciousness. Thus he would make himself enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind — that he would be considered a madman is evident. How horribly painful such a condition! Hell could invent no greater torture than that of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong.In like manner, nothing can be clearer than that a very generous spirit — truly feeling what all merely profess — must inevitably find itself misconceived in every direction — its motives misinterpreted. Just as extremeness of intelligence would be thought fatuity, so excess of chivalry could not fail of being looked upon as meanness in the last degree — and so on with other virtues. This subject is a painful one indeed. That individuals have so soared above the plane of their race is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all the biographies of the "good and the great," while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Pain, Fate, Feeling, History

“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”

José Saramago book Death with Interruptions

Source: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172

Life, Death, People, Dogs

“It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgements and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantité negligeable.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

p 45
The Undiscovered Self (1958)

Decision, Future

“A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.”

John Dennis (1658–1734) British dramatist

The Gentleman's Magazine (1781), Vol. li. p. 324.

“And now let any Union man who complains of the measure, test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, "If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong" (1864)

Men, Truth

“The whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations. … If a man is given good evidence for a factual conclusion he cannot just refuse to accept the conclusion on the ground that in his scheme of things this evidence is not evidence at all. With evaluations, however, it is different. An evaluation is not connected logically with the factual statements on which it is based.”

Philippa Foot (1920–2010) British philosopher

"Moral Beliefs"

“We are He, since we are His body and since He was made man in order to be our Head.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

Source: On the Mystical Body of Christ, p.432

“He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 22)

Memory

“Although I came to doubt all revelation, I can never accept the idea that the Universe is a physical or chemical accident, a result of blind evolution. Even though I learned to recognize the lies, the clichés and the idolatries of the human mind, I still cling to some truths which I think all of us might accept some day. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God — a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

God, Pleasure, Truth, Way

“A man of limited vision is hard to bear with in any sphere in which he is invested with power, but intolerable in the army.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
1900s

God

“Titles are but nick-names, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it. It reduces man into the diminutive of man in things which are great, and the counterfeit of women in things which are little. It talks about its fine blue ribbon like a girl, and shows its new garter like a child. A certain writer, of some antiquity, says: "When I was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things."”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Women, Girl

“One who increases flesh, increases worms; one who increases possessions, increases worry; one who increases wives, increases witchcraft; one who increases maidservants, increases promiscuity; one who increases man-servants, increases thievery; one who increases Torah, increases life; one who increases study, increases wisdom; one who increases counsel, increases understanding; one who increases charity, increases peace.”

Hillel the Elder (-112–9 BC) Mishnah rabbi

2:7
Pirkei Avot

Life, Wisdom, Peace, Understanding

“I believe with all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven't any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood, physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain, the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man's worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess, in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the chief end even of school or college; still more of life.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)

Life, Pain, People, Pleasure

“Is this even possible today?-But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compeHing strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his' absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness- he must come one day.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality

Essay 2, Aphorism 24
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)

Love, God, People, Age

“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.”

Karl Marx book On the Jewish Question

On the Jewish Question (1843)

World

“Song, if you find a man at peace with love,
say: 'Die while you're happy,
since early death is no grief, but a refuge:
and he who can die well, should not delay.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Canzon, s'uom trovi in suo amor viver queto, di': Muor' mentre se' lieto, ché morte al tempo è non duol, ma refugio; et chi ben pò morir, non cerchi indugio. Canzone 331, st. 6 ( tr. A. S. Kline http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=331) Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

Love, Death, Happiness, Peace

“"He's not just trying to hurt the man - he's out to end his career!" (usually said when a heavyweight or superheavyweight is destroying his opponent)”

Jim Ross (1952) American professional wrestling commentator, professional wrestling referee, and restaurateur

Commentary Quotes

Hurt

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism for one of her early stories (17 March 1903), published in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 1 (1917) edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, p. 731

Men, Soul, Idea, Parting

“The true education is consequently the science of linking up the integral parts of man, and also of linking him up in turn with his immediate environment, and then with the greater whole in which he has to play his part. Each aspect, regarded as a lower aspect, can ever be simply the expression of the next higher. p. 6”

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

Education in the New Age (1954)

Education, Science, Parting

“The continual endeavor of man should be to lessen the sum of suffering and cruelty: that is the first duty of humanity.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Journey's End: The Burning Bush (1911)

Suffering

“I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to W. W. Norton, 17 February, 1931
1930s

God, Happiness, People, Sadness

“Each nation has its own pet sins to which it is merciful, and also sins which it treats as most abhorrent. In America, we are peculiarly sensitive about big money contributions for which the donors expect any reward. In England, where in some ways the standard is higher than here, such contributions are accepted as a matter of course, nay, as one of the methods by which wealthy men obtain peerages. It would be well-nigh an impossibility for a man to secure a seat in the United States Senate by mere campaign contributions, in the way that seats in the British House of Lords have often been secured without any scandal being caused thereby.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. VIII : The New York Governorship

Men, Money, Way, Housing

“Jesus appeared to the disciples after the resurrection in various forms. He appeared to Mary Magdalene so that they might take him for a gardener. Very ingeniously these manifestation of Jesus is to our minds difficult to penetrate. (He appears) as a gardener. The gardener plants seedlings in prepared soil. The soil must exert a physical and chemical influence so that the seed of the plant can grow. Yet this is not sufficient. The warmth and light of the sun must be added, together with rain, in order that growth may result. The seed of supernatural life, of sanctifying grace, cleanses from sin, so preparing the soul of man, and man must seek to preserve this life by his good works. He still needs the supernatural food, the body of the Lord, which received continually, develops and brings to completion of the life. So natural and supernatural must unite to the realization of the holiness to the people. Man must contribute his minimum work of toil, and God gives the growth. Truly, the seed, the talent, the grace of God is there, and man has simply to work, take the seeds to bring them to the bankers. So that we "may have life, and abundantly."”

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar

Mendel makes several allusions to biblical verses, including John 20:15, Matthew 25:26 and John 10:10.
Sermon on Easter
Original: Jesus erschien den Jüngern nach der Auferstehung in verschiedener Gestalt. Der Maria Magdalena erschien er so, daß sie ihn für einen Gärtner halten mochte. Sehr sinnreich sind diese Erscheinungen Jesu und unser Verstand vermag sie schwer zu durchdringen. (Er erscheint) als Gärtner. Dieser pflanzt den Samen in den zubereiteten Boden. Das Erdreich muss physikalisch-chemisch Einwirkung ausüben, damit der Same aufgeht. Doch reicht das nicht hin, es muß noch Sonnenwärme und Licht hinzukommen nebst Regen, damit das Gedeihen zustandekommt. Das übernatürliche Leben in seinem Keim, der heiligmachenden Gnade wird in die von der Sünde gereinigte, also vorbereitete Seele des Menschen hineingesenkt und es muß der Mensch durch seine guten Werke dieses Leben zu erhalten suchen. Es muss noch die übernatürliche Nahrung dazukommen, der Leib des Herrn, der das Leben weiter erhält, entwickelt und zur Vollendung bringt. So muss Natur und Übernatur sich vereinigen, um das Zustandekommen der Heiligkeit des Menschen. Der Mensch muß sein Scherflein Arbeit hinzugeben, und Gott gibt das Gedeihen. Es ist wahr, den Samen, das Talent, die Gnade gibt der liebe Gott, und der Mensch hat bloß die Arbeit, den Samen aufzunehmen, das Geld zu Wechslern zu tragen. Damit wir »das Leben haben und im Überflusse haben.

Life, God, People, Food

“There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Lie, Personality

“A genuine man goes to the roots. To be a radical is no more than that: to go to the roots. He who does not see things in their depth should not call himself a radical.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

“I have the same malice in my heart as far as the fight game is concerned, but outside the ring, I won't say anything a dignified man won't say.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_n11_v50/ai_17362107
On himself

Game, Heart, Fight

“And the weather so breezy/Man why can't life always be this easy?”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Flashing Lights
Lyrics, Graduation (2007)

Life, Weather

“Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Book VI, Chapter 7.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Vivian Grey (1826)

Men

“There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This, I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is, to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise. I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn, leads to a directly opposite belief. The strength of the rebellion, is its military — its army. That army dominates all the country, and all the people, within its range. Any offer of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition to that army, is simply nothing for the present; because such man or men, have no power whatever to enforce their side of a compromise, if one were made with them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Letter to James C. Conkling (1863)

Men, People, Peace, Way

“There is no level of moral achievement upon which man can have or actually has an easy conscience.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

vol. 1, p. 131
The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1941)

“When the qualification to vote is regulated by years, it is placed on the firmest possible ground, because the qualification is such as nothing but dying before the time can take away; and the equality of Rights, as a principle, is recognized in the act of regulating the exercise. But when Rights are placed upon, or made dependent upon property, they are on the most precarious of all tenures. "Riches make themselves wings, and fly away," and the rights fly with them; and thus they become lost to the man when they would be of most value.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Letter to the Addressers (1792)

Exercises, Time, Dependency, Flying

“A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 70
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Men, Housing

“The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech at the Printing Trade Festival (1845).
1840s

People

“Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.”

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

“[N]o less mischief happens to a man from unseasonable depletion than from repletion… to the bulk of mankind it is of little consequence which of these rules they observe… whether they make it a practice to take one or two meals [per day]. But there are certain persons who cannot readily change their diet with impunity; and if they make any alteration in it for one day, or even for a part of a day, are greatly injured thereby.”

Hippocrates (-460–-370 BC) ancient Greek physician

p, 125
Ancient Medicine

Change, Parting, Personality

“But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Mais qu’un marchand de chameaux excite une sédition dans sa bourgade; qu’associé à quelques malheureux coracites il leur persuade qu’il s’entretient avec l’ange Gabriel; qu’il se vante d’avoir été ravi au ciel, et d’y avoir reçu une partie de ce livre inintelligible qui fait frémir le sens commun à chaque page; que, pour faire respecter ce livre, il porte dans sa patrie le fer et la flamme; qu’il égorge les pères, qu’il ravisse les filles, qu’il donne aux vaincus le choix de sa religion ou de la mort, c’est assurément ce que nul homme ne peut excuser, à moins qu’il ne soit né Turc, et que la superstition n’étouffe en lui toute lumière naturelle.
Referring to Muhammad, in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (December 1740), published in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 7 (1869), edited by Georges Avenel, p. 105
Citas

Death, Books, Religion, Angels

“The erotic instinct is something questionable, and will always be so whatever a future set of laws may have to say on the matter. It belongs, on the one hand, to the original animal nature of man, which will exist as long as man has an animal body. On the other hand, it is connected with the highest forms of the spirit. But it blooms only when the spirit and instinct are in true harmony. If one or the other aspect is missing, then an injury occurs, or at least there is a one-sided lack of balance which easily slips into the pathological. Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)

Law, Question, Nature, Future

“For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

A Death in the Desert (1864)

Love, Death, Knowledge, Light

“That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes … is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect. We may therefore call it quite an abnormality when hunger bred the thirst for blood … that thirst which history teaches us can never more be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage. One can only account for it all by the human beast of prey having made itself monarch of the peaceful world, just as the ravening wild beast usurped dominion of the woods … And little as the savage animals have prospered, we see the sovereign human beast of prey decaying too. Owing to a nutriment against his nature, he falls sick with maladies that claim but him, attains no more his natural span of life or gentle death, but, plagued by pains and cares of body and soul unknown to any other species, he shuffles through an empty life to its ever fearful cutting short.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Part III
Religion and Art (1880)

Life, Death, Hunger, Pain

“Only a seaman realises to what great extent an entire ship reflects the personality and ability of one individual, her Commanding Officer. To a landsman, this is not understandable—and sometimes it is even difficult for us to comprehend—but it is so! A ship at sea is a different world in herself, and in consideration of the protracted and distant operations of the fleet units, the Navy must place great power, responsibility and trust in the hands of those leaders chosen for command. In each ship there is one man who, in the hour of emergency or peril at sea, can turn to no other man. There is one who alone is ultimately responsible for the safe navigation, engineering performance, accurate gunfire and morale of the ship. He is the Commanding Officer. He is the ship. This is the most difficult and demanding assignment in the Navy. There is not an instant during his tour as Commanding Officer that he can escape the grasp of command responsibility. His privileges, in view of his obligations, are almost ludicrously small; nevertheless, this is the spur which has given the Navy its great leaders. It is a duty which richly deserves the highest, time-honoured title of the seafaring world—Captain.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Command at Sea: the Prestige, Privilege and Burden of Command

World, Understanding, Distant, Time

“I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon…. O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing —
Not even I — would undo me so!”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

" The Going http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/2716" (1912), lines 38-42, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Soul, Dead

“The Urning is not by a hair’s breadth any more dangerous to immature boys than the genuine man is to immature girls. For the rest, I gladly leave the child molester to his deserved punishment by the law. Let the integrity of a will-less minor be sacred to every Urning.”

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895) German jurist, writer and pioneer of LGBT human rights

Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Investigation of the Enigma of Homosexual Love) (1898); cited in: Citizens Allied for Civic Action (CAFCA), http://www.qrd.org/qrd/religion/anti/annotated.pink.swastika The Annotated Pink Swastika http://www.qrd.org/qrd/religion/anti/annotated.pink.swastika. p. 11

Law, Girl, Boy

“They are working on The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, The Hulk— they're doing a sequel to Spider-Man, a sequel to X-Men, and probably a third sequel to Blade. They still haven't gotten around to Nick Fury, Agent of S. H. I. E. L. D.”

Stan Lee (1922–2018) American comic book writer

they have to do the Ghost Rider.
On characters he created in comic books which are being used as the basis of movies. Interview at the DareDevil movie premiere (February 2003).

Men

“Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, Common Sense (1776)

God

“Were a man to live as long as Methuselah, and to spend all his days in the highest delights sin can offer, one hour of the anguish and tribulation that must follow, would far outweigh them.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

A commentary upon the holy Bible: Job to Salomon's song (1835), p. 418.

“There is a trick with which votaries of Feminism seek to prejudice the public mind against its critics, and that is the “fake” that any man who ventures to criticise the pretensions of Feminism, is actuated by motives of personal rancour against the female sex.”

Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1926) British barrister and journalist

Introduction https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Fraud_of_Feminism/Introduction The Fraud of Feminism (1913)

Sex, Motivation, Personality

“A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 31.

“And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as support for the earth, which is sort of a broad trough. Any power which in disposing them as they are disposes them for the best never enters into their minds, not do they imagine that there is any superhuman strength in that; they rather expect to find another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good is, and are clearly of the opinion that the obligatory and containing power of the good is as nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach me. But as I have failed either to discover myself or to learn of anyone else, the nature of the best, I will exhibit to you, if you like, what I have found to be the second best mode of inquiring into the cause.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

World, Imagination, Support, Nature

“Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham (4 January 1939))

Truth

“Man is created free, and is free,
Though he be born in chains.”

Friedrich Schiller Die Worte des Glaubens

Die Worte des Glaubens (The Word of the Faithful), st. 2 (1797)

“But at power or wealth, for the sake of which wars, and all kinds of strife, arise among mankind, we do not aim; we desire only our liberty, which no honorable man relinquishes but with his life.”
At nos non imperium neque divitias petimus, quarum rerum causa bella atque certamina omnia inter mortales sunt, sed libertatem, quam nemo bonus nisi cum anima simul amittit.

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

Source: Bellum Catilinae (c. 44 BC), Chapter XXXIII, section 5

Life, War, Wealth

“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VII, sec. 4.
Naturalis Historia

Nature, Learning

“Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interests. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

ibid., chap. 206

Truth, Religion, Nature, Evil

“Whether we are Christians or Muslims or nationalists or agnostics or atheists, we must first learn to forget our differences. If we have differences, let us differ in the closet; when we come out in front, let us not have anything to argue about until we get finished arguing with the man.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Source: The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)

Learning, Forgetting

“We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.”

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

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

Beauty

“Being on the moon had a profound spiritual impact upon my life. Before I entered space with the Apollo 15 mission in July of 1971, I was a lukewarm Christian, to say the least! I was even a silent Christian, but I feel the Lord sent me to the moon so I could return to the earth and share his Son, Jesus Christ. The entire space achievement is put in proper perspective when one realizes that God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon. I believe that God walked on the earth 2,000 years ago in the person of Jesus Christ. I have totally yielded my life to the Lord’s service to tell people everywhere about the life-changing message of Christ.”

James Irwin book More Than Earthlings

More Than Earthlings: An Astronaut's Thoughts for Christ-Centered Living (1983)

Life, God, People, Feeling

“How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: “this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.””

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Wie finden wir uns selbst wieder? Wie kann sich der Mensch kennen? Er ist eine dunkle und verhüllte Sache; und wenn der Hase sieben Häute hat, so kann der Mensch sich sieben mal siebzig abziehn und wird noch nicht sagen können: »das bist du nun wirklich, das ist nicht mehr Schale«.
“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Time

“The ambition for broad acres leads to poor farming, even with men of energy. I scarcely ever knew a mammoth farm to sustain itself; much less to return a profit upon the outlay. I have more than once known a man to spend a respectable fortune upon one; fail and leave it; and then some man of more modest aims, get a small fraction of the ground, and make a good living upon it. Mammoth farms are like tools or weapons, which are too heavy to be handled. Ere long they are thrown aside, at a great loss.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Men, Loss

“You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?… We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Life, Men, Pain, Peace

“I was once asked for my autograph in the shower on one of my rare visits to the gym. I was washing my hair, facing the wall, when I was tapped on the shoulder so already it's quite inappropriate. I turned round and there was another naked man standing there with a piece of paper. And I think 'if you can't see how inappropriate this I am just going to have to play along' so I took the paper, which is slowly becoming mulch, and carved my name in it.”

David Tennant (1971) Scottish actor

David Tennant on fan obsession, The Graham Norton Show, 14 April 2011 Source: Graham Norton welcomes David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Josh Groban and Jon Richardson, BBC Press Office, 15 April 2011, 15 April 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/04_april/15/norton.shtml,

Thinking

“The survival and development of democracy depends not so much on the development of democratic ideals which are wide-spread and strong. Today, more than ever before, democracy depends upon the development of efficient forms of democratic social management and upon the spreading of the skill in such management to the common man.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Frontiers in group dynamics II, 1947, p. 153.

Democracy, Strong, Dependency

“A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

John Kinsella’s Lament For Mrs. Mary Moore http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1520/', st. 1 Last Poems (1936-1939)

Death

“Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property, and first brings to realization the original tendency inherent in land-division, namely, equality. In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Rent of Land, p. 65.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

Way, Personality

““ We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

Marriage, Girl, Success

“We imagine that hardness, violence, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, temptation, and deviltry of every sort, everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, raptor- and snake-like in man, serves as well for the advancement of the species "man" as their opposite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 50]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]

Imagination, Evil, Heart

“Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Denke dir ein Endliches ins Unendliche gebildet, so denkst du einen Menschen.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (1968) #98

Thinking

“Ludwig von Mises referred to Ayn Rand as 'the most courageous man in America.' If that doesn't say it all about the economist's man-centric frame of reference, I don't know what does.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises" http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/03/libertarian-feminists-make-move-on-von.html Economic Policy Journal, March 28, 2014. 2010s, 2014

Courage

“For example, a man who had seen a great many white swans might argue, by our principle, that on the data it was probable that all swans were white, and this might be a perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved by the fact that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in spite of the fact that some data render it improbable. In the case of the swans, a man might know that colour is a very variable characteristic in many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to colour is peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum, by no means proving that the probability relatively to our previous data had been wrongly estimated. The fact, therefore, that things often fail to fulfill our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will not probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our inductive principle is at any rate not capable of being disproved by an appeal to experience. The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"On Induction"
1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Error, Knowledge, Animals