Quotes about man
page 68

“They came here—the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened—to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Inaugural address (1965)

Justice, Hope

“Unbounded courage and compassion join'd,
Tempering each other in the victor's mind,
Alternately proclaim him good and great,
And make the hero and the man complete.”

Joseph Addison The Campaign

Source: The Campaign (1704), Line 219.

Courage

“As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Love

“The question rises whether in the middle of all these manifold, exciting labors and Party-assignments I could still find rime for intimate experiences, for the pangs and joys of love. Unfortunately, yes! I say unfortunately because ordinarily these experiences entailed all too many cares, disappointments, and pain, and because all too many energies were pointlessly consumed through them. Yet the longing to be understood by a man down to the deepest, most secret recesses of one's soul, to be recognized by him as a striving human being, repeatedly decided matters. And repeatedly disappointment ensued all too swiftly, since the friend saw in me only the feminine element which he tried to mold into a willing sounding board to his own ego. So repeatedly the moment inevitably arrived in which I had to shake off the chains of community with an aching heart but with a sovereign, uninfluenced will. Then I was again alone. But the greater the demands life made upon me, the more the responsible work waiting to be tackled, the greater grew the longing to be enveloped by love, warmth, understanding. All the easier, consequently, began the old story of disappointment in love, the old story of Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love, Life, Pain, Secret

“Most beliefs about nature and man, which were not founded on scientific observation, have served directly or indirectly religious and social interests, and hence they have been protected by force against the criticisms of persons who have the inconvenient habit of using their reason.”

J. B. Bury book A History of Freedom of Thought

p.17 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t71v5g25n;view=1up;seq=21 A History of Freedom of Thought (1913)

Nature, Personality

“As a young man, I was more a white liberal than I ever tried to put on black. For all that, I ended up a “minority,” the beneficiary of affirmative action programs to redress black exclusion. And, harder to say, my brown advantage became a kind of embarrassment. For I never had an adversarial relationship to American culture. I was never at war with the tongue. Brown was no longer invisible by the time I got to college. In the white appraisal, brown skin became a coat of disadvantage, which was my advantage. Acknowledgment came at a price, then as now. (Three decades later, the price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation.) I remain at best ambivalent about those Hispanic anthologies where I end up; about those anthologies where I end up the Hispanic; about shelves at the bookstore where I look for myself and find myself. The fact that my books are published at all is the result of the slaphappy strategy of the northern black Civil Rights movement.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Love, War, Books, Time

“The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Universities, Actual and Ideal (1874)
1870s

“The greatest danger to the British Empire and to the British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not in the 'Yellow Peril' nor the 'Black Peril' nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation of boy labour, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty, the awful jumbles of an obsolete Poor Law, the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury—here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her power.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 139-140
Early career years (1898–1929)

Life, People, Youth, Law

“Ay me! what perils do environ
The man that meddles with cold iron!”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto III, line 1
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

“There is a process of slow modification and development mainly in directions which I view with misgiving. "Tory democracy," the favourite idea on that side, is no more like the Conservative party in which I was bred, than it is like Liberalism. In fact less. It is demagogism … applied in the worst way, to put down the pacific, law-respecting, economic elements which ennobled the old Conservatism, living upon the fomentation of angry passions, and still in secret as obstinately attached as ever to the evil principle of class interests. The Liberalism of to-day is better … yet far from being good. Its pet idea is what they called construction, — that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man. Both the one and the other have much to estrange me, and have had for many, many years.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Lord Acton (11 February 1885), quoted in The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume III (1903) by John Morley, p. 172
1880s

Secret, Law, Way, Democracy

“I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)

Law, Behavior, Nature

“It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech … that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603) Works, Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819) p. 133, https://books.google.com/books?id=xgE9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA133 Vol. 2

Pleasure, Knowledge, Victory, Parting

“The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. “What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?” ('“the Dharma-Body of the Buddha” is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, “The hedge at the bottom of the garden.” “And the man who realizes this truth,” the novice dubiously inquires, “what, may I ask, is he?””

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, “A golden-haired lion.”
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Truth, Way, Question, Time

“Bob Hope will go to the opening of a phone booth in a gas station in Anaheim, providing they have a camera there and three people. He'll go to the opening of a market to receive an award. He'd get an award from Thom McCan for wearing their shoes. It's pathetic. It's a bottomless pit. A barrel that has no floor. He must be a man who has an ever-crumbling estimation of himself. He's constantly filling himself up. He's like a junkie – an applause junkie. What happens to those people when they can't get up and do their shtick, God only knows. Bob Hope, Christ, instead of growing old gracefully or doing something with his money, be helpful, all he does is he has an anniversary with the President looking on. It's sad. He gets on an airplane every two minutes always going someplace. It didn't bother him at all to work the Vietnam War. Oh, he took that in his stride. He did his World War II and Korean War act. "Our boys" and all that. He’s a pathetic guy.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Money, God, War, People

“So much is a man worth as he esteems himself.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Pantagruel (1532), Chapter 29 : How Pantagruel discomfited the three hundred Giants armed with free-stone, and Loupgarou their Captain (Loup-garou is the french term for werewolf).

“You cannot build a great nation or brotherhood of man by spreading envy or hatred.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

The Path To Power (1995)

Envy

“The Conservative Party in the House of Commons has played ball with Paisley for 18 months, during which he has sat among them on the government benches but voted against them…For was he not the secret weapon of those who wanted to send Ulster the way of white Rhodesia? … That is why the Northern Ireland Secretary, Mr Humphrey Atkins, and the Northern Ireland Office spent the first year-and-a-half of this Parliament building up Ian Paisley and whispering to him and to everybody else that he was going to be the big white chief under a new set-up which they planned to introduce. They recognized in him a man with no dedication to the Union, a man who would abuse the Parliament of the Union to its face and declared that he owed it no allegiance…He is afraid for his own skin, and afraid of the fringe men of violence on whose backs he would fain ride, provided he can distance himself from them when serious trouble looms. The old adage holds good; all bullies are cowards, and most cowards are bullies. That is the last trait which completed the portrait of the man who the enemies of the Union are hoping against hope will put them in business again.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech in Belfast (8 May 1981), reported in The Times (9 May 1981), p. 2

Men, Secret, Hope, Way

“The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the dragqueen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other dragqueens; like the functionalist, he has an identity - a female; he tries to define all his troubles away - but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 8 ("dragqueen", "dragqueens", & hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original).

Men

“We cannot always know the man who leads, just as I am no longer privileged to recognize the face of every sailor and marine who obeys.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

A Tradition of Victory, Cap 12 "The Flag Commands"

“Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Village Blacksmith

St. 1.
The Village Blacksmith (1842)

Tree, Strong

“I've said many times that you can't stop science… God made man in his own image. God intended for man to become one with God. We are going to become one with God. We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God.”

Richard Seed (1928) American physicist and entrepreneur

National Public Radio (1998-01-07)

God, Knowledge, Science, Time

“I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

Comment while on an American tour (March 1842), as quoted in Dickens (1949) by Hesketh Pearson, Ch. 8

Idea

“This one guy, the worse guy in the music. The Yanni man. You know Yanni? First of all, anyone who looks like a magician and doesn't do magic, I don't like. I don't even like magic, I hate it. But I love the word, "Ta-da"! I love that word! I don't get to say it, right? I never do any magic. You just cant go around walking, "Ta-da!" "Ta-da!" "Ta-da!" The only time I can say it is when I do something really stupid or surprising. Like if I go out all night drinking and hitting strip clubs and I come home and I still got some money …. "Ta---da!"”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

I thought I was broke. Why does my jaw hurt?
Comedy Central Presents: Dave Attell

Love, Money, Hate, Stupidity

“For Greek democracy failed, and the reasons for its failure are full of instruction. The great ruling ideas which the Greeks gave to the world, ideas which England later was to absorb and spread over a quarter of the globe, freedom and self-government, social equality and civic patriotism, these were corrupted by demagogues and flatterers of the people. It was so fatally easy to think that freedom meant doing what you like, that one man was not only as good as another but equally able to fill any office whatsoever, that majorities could do no wrong, that you could make Utopian laws for your own country without regard to what other nations or other empires were doing…Freedom of speech was stifled and public men who refused to advocate pleasures for the public multitude were banished. Politicians rivalled one another in bribing the electorate.”

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

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), pp. 35-36.
1930

Men, People, Pleasure, World

“I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions. More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote. I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age. If I want to kill myself I feel that should be my business. If I go out and hold up gas stations at night to pay for my supply it is because the law inflates a very cheap thing into an escalated war against my nerves and my soul.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

"This Floundering Old Bastard is the Best Damn Poet in Town", interview by John Thomas, in LA Free Press (1967)
Interviews

Men, War, Age, Law

“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.”

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

Quoted in 50 Military Leaders Who Changed the World‎ (2007) by William Weir, p. 173
Unsourced variant: Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man. Anything built by man, can be destroyed by him.

Stupidity

“I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“If you push it, it feels good; I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with kinesthesia. I feel now that I am painting I'm not drawing anything, or even representing non-objective art. You know, you can represent abstract art, too, as well as heads figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters, you know that. And a lot of figurative artists are very abstract. I don't feel as if I'm doing that. I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. I always thought I am a very spiritual man, not interested in paint, and now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are, a balloon, how light things are, things levitating, pushing forms, make me feel as if my hand is pushing in a head, bulges out here and pushes there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Art, Feeling, Light, Drawing

“As remote as the rings of Saturn… A man with his stubby million-rand finger perennially prodding the public's pulse, his eyes constantly roving the horizons of the future, Kerzner has the power of a Prometheus unbound.”

Jani Allan (1952) South African columnist and broadcaster

Description of Sol Kerzner from interview published in the Just Jani column of the Sunday Times, republished in Face Value by Jani Allan.
Sunday Times

Future

“Mankind is becoming more ethical, but it is not happening because man has decided to become better than he was 100 years ago. It’s because we know we live in a glass house where everybody can see.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Housing

“Misplaced charity iz a good blunder tew make. If yu want tew git a good general idea ov a man's karakter find out from him what hiz opinion ov his nabor iz.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Idea

“How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.”

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia

The Convalescent.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

“Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad? I have kids! What do you think? "Yeah, I don't want them to have any kind of a -- I want things to corrode to the point where we're all living in huts." […] [I] "like things to go a little wrong" like birdshot to the face of a guy that would survive, not "like things to go wrong" till it's like Mad Max, every-man-for-himself-let's-all-ride-around-and-machine-guns, which seems to be the way that it's”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

going
Responding to King's suggestion that as a political comedian Stewart would "want things to be bad" because that would provide him with the most fodder for jokes

Way, Guy, Thinking, Madness

“…Darwinian Man, though well-behav’d,
At best is only a monkey shav’d!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Princess Ida (1884)

“Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses, vol. 10, 1863, p. 110.
1860s

Death, God, Law, Penalty

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“When the good man yields his breath
(For the good man never dies).”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

The Wanderer of Switzerland, Part v. Compare: "Say not that the good die" (translated from original Greek), Callimachus, Epigram x.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“If you owe a man a dollar, pay it; if you owe him a grudge, forget it, and always be kind.”

Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924) American mayor

[Powderly, Terence, 'The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terence V. Powderly, 1940, Columbia University Press, 9781163178164, https://archive.org/stream/pathitrodautobio00powdrich, 34]

Forgetting

“There are those who strive to stamp with disrepute
The luscious food, because it feeds the brute;
In tropes of high-strain'd wit, while gaudy prigs
Compare thy nursling man to pamper'd pigs;
With sovereign scorn I treat the vulgar jest,
Nor fear to share thy bounties with the beast.”

Joel Barlow (1754–1812) American diplomat

Canto 1: st. 10, lines 1–6
The Hasty-Pudding (1793)

Fear, Food

“The critic must be reconciled to his necessary, ambiguous role, and however much he may caper, joke, and posture for us in his writings, we are unlikely to forget that he is a man who may, at any moment, tread heavily upon our dreams — unworthy dreams, foolish dreams, stupid dreams, sometimes — but still dreams.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Stupidity, Dreams, Forgetting

“The wayfaring man, Christ Jesus, has helped many and many a tired traveler home with burdens quite as heavy as yours. Often and often He goes up and down this thoroughfare of life in search of just such overladen pilgrims; and His voice is sounding forth above all the babble of the busy tongues and the clatter of the busy wheels, saying, — "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."”

Washington Gladden (1836–1918) American pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 98.

Life, Travel, Home, Search

“I said years ago that I would rather be the man who helped on a rational scheme which should secure the comfort of old age than I would be a general who had won ever so many victories in the field. These are, to me, the two most tragic sights in the world—a man who is able to work, and anxious to work, and who cannot get work; and the other tragic sight is that of a man who has worked until his eyes have become dim, and his natural force has become abated, and he is left to spend the declining years of a life that has been so nobly used, so honourably used, in straits, difficulties, and hardships.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech in Manchester (4 July 1895), quoted in 'Mr. Morley In Manchester', The Times (5 July 1895), p. 10.

Life, Age, World, Nature

“He imprisons and tortures at Guantanamo. He imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib. He has secret torture chambers in Europe. Yes, he imprisons even here in the United States, with his jails carrying more blacks than his universities can ever enroll. He even suspends the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Take Guantanamo for example; at that concentration camp international law does not apply. The national laws of the people there do not apply. Laws of the United States of America do not apply. Only Bush's law applies. Can the international community accept being lectured by this man on the provisions of the universal declaration of human rights? Definitely not!”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly (26 September 2007)
2000s, 2005 - 2009

People, Secret, Law, Communication

“One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 19

Life, Education, Feeling

“Forgiveness: Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.”

Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) German-American actress and singer

Marlene Dietrich's ABC https://books.google.com/books?id=u7x5UYHMs0IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:Marlene+intitle:Dietrich%27s+intitle:abc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjv7qiV8cPfAhWinuAKHcZLAWQQ6AEIKjAA#v=snippet&q=forgiveness&f=false (1962)

“She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."”

Milan Kundera book Identity

Identity (1998)

“This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”

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

Radio and television report to the American people on civil rights (11 June 1963)]
1963, Civil Rights Address

Men

“The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)
The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience arched to endure,
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Patience, Night

“The modern young man,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Very Good, Jeeves

Very Good, Jeeves (1930)

Strong

“Leader of the Chorus: An insult directed at the wicked is not to be censured; on the contrary, the honest man, if he has sense, can only applaud.”

Aristophanés The Knights

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Kn.+1274 Knights, line 1274-1275 Knights (424 BC)

Sense

“Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 2 : Writing for the Stage

“Man proposes, God disposes. (translated by Thornton)”
Sperat quidem animus : quo eveniat, diis in manu est

Plautus Bacchides

Bacchides Act I, scene 2, line 36.
Variant translation: The mind is hopeful : success is in God’s hands. (translator unknown)
Bacchides (The Bacchises)

God

“In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life, Truth, Religion, Knowledge

“That subtle knot which makes us man:
So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

The Extasy, line 64

Soul, Lovers, Sense

“God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

God, Happiness, Religion, Imagination

“I'd like to be remembered for being a good, kind, loving, gentle man who attempted to live wisely, and who cared a lot.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

Love

“He seems a very harmless sort of young man, nothing to like or dislike in him — goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning, and plays at whist and makes queer faces in the evening.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1813-09-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“It is impossible to understand the American public without taking into account the tremendous psychological effect of bringing up a generation of people in a daily environment of advertising. It is impossible to escape the advertising man; his sales talk assaults us in the morning newspaper, in the street car, with billboards along the highways, and in his shameless use of the radio. This means that from morning till night, in the midst of our work as in our recreation, we live constantly in an atmosphere of intellectual shoddiness. Every popular prejudice and vulgar conceit is played upon and pandered to in the interests of salesmanship. Everywhere material interests and herd opinion are strengthened to the loss of personal independence. The tendency is to think and speak for effect rather than out of one's inner life. There is a marked decline the ability to play with ideas, or to live the spiritual life for its own sake. Hence a decline in civilization of interest, humor and urbanity. Advertising tends to make mechanized barbarians of us all.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Conflict of the Individual and the Mass in the Modern World (1932), pp. 29-30

Life, People, Cars, Idea

“Without getting into blushing territory, think how in almost all of creation the male and female are made for each other. From dogs and elephants, to birds and bees, to man, each is designed for reproduction. Like a nut and a bolt, they are made to fit together perfectly.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Dogs, Bird, Thinking, Bee

“[From Ernest von Hermanstadt]; Action—action in the sunshine—passion—but little feeling, and less thought: such was meant to be our existence. But we refine—we sadden and we subdue—we call up the hidden and evil spirits of the inner world—we wake from their dark repose those who will madden us. The heart is like the wood on yonder flickering hearth: green and fresh, haunted by a thousand sweet odours, bathed in the warm air, and gladdened by the summer sunshine—so grew it at first upon its native soil. But nature submitteth to art, and man has appointed for it another destiny: it is gathered, and cast into the fire. It seems, then, as if its life had but just begun. A new spirit has crept into the kindled veins—a brilliant light dances around it—it is bright—it is beautiful—and it is consumed! What remains?—A warmth on the atmosphere soon passing away, and a heap of blackened ashes! What more will remain of the heart?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Life, World, Beauty, Art

“[I]n this life-long fight, to be waged by everyone of us as single-handed against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good fight, the last proof and test of our courage and manfulness, must be loyalty to truth — the most rare and difficult of all human qualities. For such loyalty, as it grows in perfection, asks ever more and more of us, and sets before us a standard of manliness always rising higher and higher.”

Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) English lawyer, author and cricketer

Part II
The Manliness of Christ (1879)

Life, Truth, Courage, Fight

“Ironically, or so it seemed to Tristam, the day was perfect and the green countryside rolled past in ordered tranquillity, the death of a single man having shockingly little impact on the larger world.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: World Without End (1995), Chapter 5 (p. 67)

Death, World, Past, Perfection

“Apparently this is true, according to one The_Mad_Revisionist, who is incidentally the aforementioned one man who believes fervently that (a) the moon does not exist, and (b) there's a huge worldwide conspiracy covering this up. Amazing how times change; as little as a hundred years ago we used to keep loonies like this in big sanitariums where they get poked with sticks and hosed down with cold water every night. Nowadays, we just give them websites. Heh. I just realised you could make a half-decent Matrix parody out of this guy. There Is No Moon.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Meet the crazy moon man http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/essays/moon.htm Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Guy, Water, Change, Time

“Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Wakefield

"Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

World, Fear

“My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Source: The Door Into Summer (1957), Chapter 5

Law

“And you can't part a boy from his father,
You can't part a boy from his dad,
You can't part a Scotchman from money
No matter how many he's had.
You can't part the skin of a sausage
Or a dad from his fond son and heir,
And you can't part the hair on a bald-headed man
For there'll be no parting there.”

Billy Bennett (1887–1942) British comedian

"Daddy", line 33

Money, Boy, Parting

“Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox than Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. (long list of character deficiencies elided)…
His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he had a couple of small but inspiring victories when elsewhere Southern troops were being slaughtered and routed and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever enjoyed.”

Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

Source: A Walk in the Woods (1997), Chapter 13 (p. 171)

People, History, Victory

“What is to be the nature of the domestic legislation of the future? (Hear, hear.) I cannot help thinking that it will be more directed to what are called social subjects than has hitherto been the case.—How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people (hear, hear), how to increase their enjoyment of life (cheers), that is the problem of the future; and just as there are politicians who would occupy all the world and leave nothing for the ambition of anybody else, so we have their counterpart at home in the men who, having already annexed everything that is worth having, expect everybody else to be content with the crumbs that fall from their table. If you will go back to the origin of things you will find that when our social arrangements first began to shape themselves every man was born into the world with natural rights, with a right to a share in the great inheritance of the community, with a right to a part of the land of his birth. (Cheers.) But all these rights have passed away. The common rights of ownership have disappeared. Some of them have been sold; some of them have been given away by people who had no right to dispose of them; some of them have been lost through apathy and ignorance; some have been stolen by fraud (cheers); and some have been acquired by violence. Private ownership has taken the place of these communal rights, and this system has become so interwoven with our habits and usages, it has been so sanctioned by law and protected by custom, that it might be very difficult and perhaps impossible to reverse it. But then, I ask, what ransom will property pay for the security which it enjoys? What substitute will it find for the natural rights which have ceased to be recognized?”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech to the Birmingham Artisans' Association at Birmingham Town Hall (5 January 1885), quoted in ‘Mr. Chamberlain At Birmingham.’, The Times (6 January 1885), p. 7.
1880s

Life, Men, Happiness, People

“It's one thing to remember history and to put up historical markers that get it right. It's quite another thing to commemorate someone and to name stuff for him. You don't learn anything from driving the Jefferson Davis Highway about Jefferson Davis except that he was a great man and should be honored. And it's precisely that last little bit - should be honored - that we need to take away from him.”

James W. Loewen (1942) American historian

As quoted in "Rejection Of Flag Exposes Larger Truths About The Confederacy" http://www.npr.org/2015/07/02/419554834/rejection-of-flag-exposes-larger-truths-about-the-confederacy (2 July 2015), by Robert Siegel, NPR 2015

History, Learning

“What second love could she [Olympias] make out of her ruined first love? The second love that most women make out of their first love for husbands grows from a mutual and tacit sadness in both husband and wife that he is only in rare moments the man both would like him to be.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Lives of Wives (London: Cassell, 1939)

Love, Women, Sadness

“Then there was the man who declared in court, he wasn't a person. "Excuse me, sir, why haven't you paid your taxes." "Well, as you can clearly see, I am not a person." "Well, you look like a person."”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

"No it's all done with mirrors, trust me!"
Taxed Beyond Belief (2002)

Personality

“There are still a few erect human beings in the socalled world. Proudly and humbly, I say to these human beings:
"O my fellow citizens, many an honest man believes a lie. Though you are as honest as the day, fear and hate the liar. Fear and hate him when he should be feared and hated:now. Fear and hate him were he should be feared and hated:in yourselves.
"Do not hate and fear the artist in yourselves, my fellow citizens. Honour him and love him. Love him truly— do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow.
"Only the artist in yourselves is more truthful than the night."”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams

Love, Hate, Truth, Lie

“If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Part II: "The White Race and Its Heroes"
1960s, Soul on Ice (1968)

Hope, Change

“A man without trust might as well be dead.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lews Therin Telamon
(15 October 1994)

Dead

“We wish we were doing it, of course, under much better circumstances, but this man was loved. For Chris.”

Axl Rose (1962) American singer-songwriter and musician

At a Guns N' Roses concert in Ireland before playing Black Hole Sun in tribute to Chris Cornell on May 27, 2017. Quoted in "Guns N' Roses Play Special Tribute To Chris Cornell" http://www.antimusic.com/news/17/May/30Guns_N_Roses_Play_Special_Tribute_To_Chris_Cornell.shtml antiMusic, (30 May 2017), "Guns N' Roses - Black Hole Sun (COMPLETE)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCX9pNhBBQ YouTube, (27 May 2017)

Love

“So, there was a girl.
What I’ve guessed, and what the history books imply, is that she was unlucky enough to have been sired by a cruel man. He beat both wife and daughter and abused them in other ways. Bright Itempas is called, among other things, the god of justice. Perhaps that was why He responded when she came into His temple, her heart full of unchildlike rage.
“I want him to die,” she said (or so I imagine). “Please Great Lord, make him die.”
You know the truth now about Itempas. He is a god of warmth and light, which we think of as pleasant, gentle things. I once thought of Him that way, too. But warmth uncooled burns; light undimmed can hurt even my blind eyes. I should have realized. We should all have realized. He was never what we wanted Him to be.
So when the girl begged the Bright Lord to murder her father, He said, “Kill him yourself.” And He gifted her with a knife perfectly suited to her small, weak child’s hands.
She took the knife home and used it that very night. The next day, she came back to the Bright Lord, her hands and soul stained red, happy for the first time in her short life. “I will love you forever,” she declared. And He, for a rare once, found Himself impressed by mortal will.
Or so I imagine.
The child was mad, of course. Later events proved this. But it makes sense to me that this madness, not mere religious devotion, would appeal most to the Bright Lord. Her love was unconditional, her purpose undiluted by such paltry considerations as conscience or doubt. It seems like Him, I think, to value that kind of purity of purpose—even though, like warmth and light, too much love is never a good thing.”

N. K. Jemisin book The Broken Kingdoms

Source: The Broken Kingdoms (2011), Chapter 11 “Possession” (watercolor) (pp. 202-203)

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

Love, Lie

“If men are not supposed to tell women how women must behave, what right do women have to demand that men cater to their interest? Who are they to tell men that manhood means? Why should men accept their authority? What the Hell do women know about it what it means to be a man?”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

"Mother May I" Masculinity
A Sky Without Eagles (2014)

Women, Men, Hell

“It was then that through the open door Einstein saw the man connecting the new battery, and precisely at the same time he did it, Einstein saw the cows jumping up away from the wire. All at once. Exactly. A fair amount of displeased mooing ensued.”

João Magueijo (1967) Portuguese scientist

pg. 16
Faster than the Speed of Light

Time

“There's a light that is shining in the heart of a man,
it's the light that was shining when the world began.
There's a light that is shining in the Turk and the Jew
and a light that is shining, friend, in me and in you.”

Sydney Carter (1915–2004) British musician and poet

George Fox

World, Light, Heart

“One time me and three friends dropped acid and drove around in my dad's car. He has one of those talking cars, we're tripping, and the car goes, "The door is ajar." We pulled over and thought about that for 12 hours. "How can a door be a jar?" … "Why would they put a jar on a car?" … "Oh man, the freeway's melting!"”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

… "Put it in the jar."
Dangerous (1990)

Cars, Time

“A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 75

Friendship, Marriage

“I think it is a rule that men in business should not be taught other things. Any one will be almost sure to make money who has no other idea in his head. A college education, or intense study of abstract truth, will not enable a man to drive a bargain … The best politicians are not those who are deeply grounded in mathematical or in ethical science. Rules stand in the way of expediency. Many a man has been hindered from pushing his fortune in the world by an early cultivation of his moral sense.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Men, Money, Truth, World

“Now habit is a labor-saving invention which enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

“One man saluted him, another bowed,
Some kissed his hand, still others kissed his foot;
Whoever touched him, joyful was and proud,
For supernatural he seemed, if not
Divine; jostling around him in a crowd,
As close as possible the Bulgars got,
And clamoured for him raucously and cried
To be their king, their captain and their guide.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Uno il saluta, un altro se gl'inchina,
Altri la mano, altri gli bacia il piede:
Ognun, quanto più può, se gli avvicina,
E beato si tien chi appresso il vede,
E più chi 'l tocca; che toccar divina
E sopranatural cosa si crede.
Lo pregan tutti, e vanno al ciel le grida,
Che sia lor re, lor capitan, lor guida.
Canto XLIV, stanza 97 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Kiss

“Eye hath not seen, tongue hath not told,
And ear hath not heard it sung,
How buoyant and bold, though it seem to grow old,
Is the heart, forever young; —

Forever young, — though life's old age
Hath every nerve unstrung:
The heart, the heart, is a heritage
That keeps the old man young!”

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810–1889) English writer and poet

The Song of Seventy.
A Thousand Lines (1846)

Life, Age, Heart

“A friend of mine who passed away some nine years ago was an active member of the NBA. And many of you may remember him, Gil Hardy. [Applause. ] Probably one of the most painful tragedies for me of my confirmation was to see the name of one of the nicest, most decent human beings I had ever met, besmirched. And Gil was my best friend at both college and at Yale Law School. He was the best man at my wedding and he is the person to whom I went for solace.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Pain, School, Law, Wedding

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast. (Original to Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

1734)
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens

Hope, Spring

“The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity, let the blackguard Paine say what he will; it is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

(26 July 1796).
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Wisdom, God, Pain, Religion

“Only the prayer which one prays as the observance of a Mitzvah is religiously significant. The spontaneous prayer ("when he is overwhelmed and pours out his complaint before God") a man prays of his own accord is, of course, halakhically permissible, but, like the performance of any act which has not been prescribed, its religious value is limited. As a religious act it is even faulty, since he who prays to satisfy his needs sets himself up as an end, as though God were a means for promotion of his welfare.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State" (1995)

God

“Man is naturally deceitful ever, in every way! ”

Aristophanés The Birds

(tr. Hickie 1853, vol. 1, p. 326 http://books.google.com/books?id=Cm4NAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA326) Birds (414 BC) Variant: Man naturally is deceitful, ever indeed, and always, in every one thing.

Way, Nature

“Thus men continue to accuse themselves of being unjust, violent, cruel, and treacherous to one another, but they do not accuse themselves of cutting the throats of other animals and of feeding upon their mangled limbs, which, nevertheless, is the single cause of that injustice, of that violence, of that cruelty, and of that treachery. … Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one's fellow without being so towards other existences.”

Jean-Antoine Gleizes (1773–1843) French writer

Thalysie: the New Existence. Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 214.

Men, Justice, Animals

“I love my fellow-creatures, I do all the good I can,
Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man
And I can't think why!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The disagreeable Man (from Princess Ida).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love, Thinking

“It was divine nature which gave us the country, and man's skill that built the cities.”
Divina Natura dedit agros, ars humana ædificavit urbes.

Marcus Terentius Varro (-116–-27 BC) ancient latin scholar

Marcus Porcius Cato on Agriculture : Marcus Terentius Varro on Agriculture. W.D. Hooper & H.B. Ash. (translation). Harvard University Press, 1993. Bk. 3, ch. 1
De Re Rustica

Nature, Country

“Robespierre listened to me with terror. He grew pale and silent for some time. This interview confirmed me in the opinion that I always had of him, that he unites the knowledge of a wise senator with the integrity of a thoroughly good man and the zeal of a true patriot but that he is lacking as a statesman in clearness of vision and determination.”

Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) politician and journalist during the French Revolution

L'Ami du peuple, vol. 7, p. 3965

Knowledge, Time

“It is said in the Book of Poetry, "In silence is the offering presented, and the spirit approached to; there is not the slightest contention." Therefore the superior man does not use rewards, and the people are stimulated to virtue. He does not show anger, and the people are awed more than by hatchets and battle-axes.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

People, Books, Silence, Anger

“Have we regarded it as the greatest enemy of Christianity, which can not abide that Jesus Christ reigns over the faithful, crying ceaselessly through the mouth of its fans, “We do not want this man to reign over us” (Saint Anthony).”

Louis Tronson (1622–1700) French Roman Catholic priest

L'avons-nous regardé comme le plus grand ennemi du Christianisme, qui ne peut souffrir que Jésus-Christ règne sur les Fidèles, criant sans cesse par la bouche de ses amateurs. Nolumus hune regnare super nos? S. Antonin. Examens particuliers sur divers sujets, p. 321 http://books.google.com/books?id=esY9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA321 Examens particuliers sur divers sujets [Examination of Conscience upon Special Subjects] (1690)

Faith, Christ, Cry

“Never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter V : “—a wedding ring is not a ring in my nose—”, p. 41

Women, Coffee, Time, Cooking