Quotes about man
page 74

Anthony Bourdain photo
John Oliver photo
William Hazlitt photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honourable gentleman has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Pitt's Reply to Walpole, Speech, March 6, 1741. This is the composition of Johnson, founded on some note or statement of the actual speech. Johnson said, "That speech I wrote in a garret, in Exeter Street." Boswell: Life of Johnson, 1741
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Bret Easton Ellis photo

“When I was bullied: you manned-up. You learned something. You realized: I'm not getting the gold star. You realized: you lose. Deal with it.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

On being bullied and the It Gets Better Project
http://twitter.com/#!/BretEastonEllis/status/143539970307653632

John Ruskin photo

“Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.”

Volume II, chapter V, section 30.
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Jean Chrétien photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Gregory Benford photo
Tony Benn photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
James Frazer photo

“The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.”

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 64, The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires.

Thomas S. Monson photo

“The wisdom of God oft times appears as foolishness to men, but the greatest single lesson we can learn in mortality is that when god speaks and a man obeys, that man will always be right.”

Thomas S. Monson (1927–2018) president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Decisions http://byub.org/findatalk/details.asp?ID=4343 BYU Devotional, February 6, 1977.

Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Alfred Rosenberg photo
Seishirō Itagaki photo

“I am convinced that in times such as these, every man must be a soldier, in substance as well as in name.”

Seishirō Itagaki (1885–1948) Japanese general

Quoted in "The Fight for the Pacific" - Page 157 - by Mark Gayn - 1941.

Daniel Handler photo
Denis Diderot photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“There is said to be hope for a sick man, as long as there is life.”
Aegroto dum anima est, spes esse dicitur.

Epistulae ad Atticum (Letters to Atticus) Book IX, Letter X, section 3
Often paraphrased as: Dum anima est, spes est ("While there is life there is hope")
Compare: "While there's life there’s hope, and only the dead have none." Theocritus, Idyll 4, line 42; as translated A. S. F. Gow

L. Ron Hubbard photo

“The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Dianetics 55! (1954).

Clinton Edgar Woods photo

“The actual manufacture of material into a specific product is a sort of digestive process which must have a functioning organization purposed to meet the required ends, just as the human body has, and it is governed by similar conditions. It must also be directed by a specific intelligence and must have internal and external avenues of correspondence to keep it alive; and, like a living organism, must adhere to the eternal economy of things and show a profit by its activities or it cannot progress.
To exemplify this in a simple way, the writer has laid out Figure I, showing the prime elements composing the anatomy of an industrial body. One does not have to draw on the imagination very far to make a comparison of this anatomy with that of man. It has its mind, will power, and brain to direct it, as indicated by the stockholders, directors and executive officers, a heart which keeps in flow the circulating medium internally; and avenues of correspondence with the outside world which furnish to it the very elements of existence.
This chart shows first, that the stockholders are simply elements belonging to the general public who have made an investment for some specific purpose; second, that immediately after this, the election of directors sets into action the first internal factor in the body, which is then divided into different functioning powers by the election of executive officers.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 24

Ernst Mayr photo

“The funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian”

Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) German-American Evolutionary Biologist

First response to the following remark by EDGE: It seems to me that Darwin is much better known in England than in the United States. Books about Darwin sell well and people debate the subjects. Here in America what passes for intellectual life doesn't necessarily include reading and having an appreciation of Darwin.
What evolution is: Talk with Ernst Mayr (2001)

Steven Erikson photo
Douglas MacArthur photo

“My dad always told us never to live where we could see the smoke from another man's chimney. He told us we should never live so close to another's house that the chickens would mingle in the woods.”

Jesse Stuart (1907–1984) American writer

Conversations with Jesse Stuart http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF001975/Peyton/Peyton01/Peyton01.html, Dave Peyton. May 5, 1975.

Francis Bacon photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“Adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to European governments has benefited Europeans as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Adieu to the Evil EU" http://www.antiwar.com/mercer/?articleid=6272/ Antiwar.com, June 10, 2005.
2000s, 2005
Variant: Europeans have come to realize that adding an overarching tier of tyrants—the EU—to their own government has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.

Booker T. Washington photo

“After making careful inquiry I can not find a half a dozen cases of a man or woman who has completed a full course of education in any of our reputable institutions like Hampton, Tuskegee, Fiske, or Atlanta, who are imprisoned. The records of the South show that 90 percent of the colored people imprisoned are without knowledge of trades and 61 percent are illiterate. But it has been said that the negro proves economically valueless in proportion as he is educated. Let us see. All will agree that the negro in Virginia, for example, began life forty years ago in complete poverty, scarcely owning clothing or a day's food. The reports of the State auditor show the negro today owns at least one twenty-sixth of the real estate in that Commonwealth exclusive of his holdings in towns and cities, and that in the counties east of the Blue Ridge Mountains he owns one-sixteenth. In Middlesex County he owns one-sixth: in Hanover, one-fourth. In Georgia the official records show that, largely through the influence of educated men and women from Atlanta schools and others, the negroes added last year $1,526,000 to their taxable property, making the total amount upon which they pay taxes in that State alone $16,700,000. Few people realize under the most difficult and trying circumstances, during the last forty years, it has been the educated negro who counseled patience, self-control, and thus averted a war of races. Every negro going out of our institutions properly educated becomes a link in the chain that shall forever bind the two races together in all essentials of life.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

Speech in New York (12 February 1904), as quoted in speech by Edward de Veaux Morrell in the House of Representatives https://cdn.loc.gov/service/rbc/lcrbmrp/t2609/t2609.pdf (4 April 1904)
1900s

Clarence Darrow photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“In the army it takes an eight-man working party to help a brass hat blow his nose.”

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 30 (p. 153)

Marshall McLuhan photo

“For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 126

Gwyneth Paltrow photo
William Graham Sumner photo

“If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.”

William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) American academic

The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (corrected edition), “The Forgotten Man” 1883 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/sumner-the-forgotten-man-and-other-essays-corrected-edition?q=Civil+liberty+is+the+status#Sumner_1225_701.

T. H. White photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Golo Mann photo

“Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.”

Golo Mann (1909–1994) German historian

Golo Mann in his Recollections, quoted in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1989), Thomas Mann and his family, p. 187.

Desmond Tutu photo

“He has a childlike, boyish, impish, mischievousness. And I have to try and make him behave properly, like a holy man!”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

As quoted in "Dalai Lama honours Tintin and Tutu" at BBC News (2 June 2006)

Chris Rock photo

“You mean to tell me that Jamaicans invented sugar, reggae and the best drug on Earth and the white man makes all the money!?”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (Album Version, 2005)

H.L. Mencken photo
Harry Truman photo

“And as I say to you, whenever you put a man on the Supreme Court, he ceases to be your friend, you can be sure of that.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Reported in Truman Speaks (1960), p. 59.

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, Tehanu (1990), Chapter 12, "Winter"

Russell Crowe photo
Revilo P. Oliver photo

“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Edgar Cayce photo

“Don't worry so much where you live but how you live. Make the family of man your family as well. ( Edgar Cayce On the Millennium Chapter One - The great new planet earth. )”

Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) Purported clairvoyant healer and psychic

Cayce answered this to a minister's question - Where is the safest place to live?
God, Spirituality

Kevin Kline photo

“Don't kiss a man who hasn't shaved.”

Kevin Kline (1947) American actor

Interview with Rebecca Murray, movies.about.com/od/delovely/a/delovekk062904_2.htm

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley photo
Charles James Fox photo

“Toleration in religion was one of the great rights of man, and a man ought never to be deprived of what was his natural right.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (19 April 1791), quoted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume IV (1815), p. 192.
1790s

Ali al-Rida photo

“Wisdom and intellect is every man's friend, ignorance and illiteracy are his enemies.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 467.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

John Lancaster Spalding photo
Thorstein Veblen photo
Charles Lamb photo
Ayn Rand photo
Enoch Powell photo

“To tell the indigenous inhabitants of Brixton or Southall or Leicester or Bradford or Birmingham or Wolverhampton, to tell the pensioners ending their days in streets of nightly terror unrecognisable as their former neighbourhoods, to tell the people of towns and cities where whole districts have been transformed into enclaves of foreign lands, that "the man with a coloured face could be an enrichment to my life and that of my neighbours" is to drive them beyond the limits of endurance. It is not so much that it is obvious twaddle. It is that it makes cruel mockery of the experience and fears of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary, decent men and women…In understanding this matter, the beginning of wisdom is to grasp the law that in human societies power is never left unclaimed and unused. It does not blow about, like wastepaper on the streets, ownerless and inert. Men's nature is not only, as Thucydides long ago asserted, to exert power where they have it: men cannot help themselves from exerting power where they have it, whether they want to or not…It is the business of the leaders of distinct and separate populations to see that the power which they possess is used to benefit those for whom they speak. Leaders who fail to do so, or to do so fast enough, find themselves outflanked and superseded by those who are less squeamish. The Gresham's Law of extremism, that the more extreme drives out the less extreme, is one of the basic rules of political mechanics which operate in this field: it is a corollary of the general principle that no political power exist without being used. Both the general law and its Gresham's corollary point, in contemporary circumstances, towards the resort to physical violence, in the form of firearms or high explosive, as being so probable as to be predicted with virtual certainty. The experience of the last decade and more, all round the world, shows that acts of violence, however apparently irrational or inappropriate their targets, precipitate a frenzied search on the part of the society attacked to discover and remedy more and more grievances, real or imaginary, among those from whom the violence is supposed to emanate or on whose behalf it is supposed to be exercised. Those commanding a position of political leverage would then be superhuman if they could refrain from pointing to the acts of terrorism and, while condemning them, declaring that further and faster concessions and grants of privilege are the only means to avoid such acts being repeated on a rising scale. This is what produces the gearing effect of terrorism in the contemporary world, yielding huge results from acts of violence perpetrated by minimal numbers. It is not, I repeat again and again, that the mass of a particular population are violently or criminally disposed. Far from it; that population soon becomes itself the prisoner of the violence and machinations of an infinitely small minority among it. Just a few thugs, a few shots, a few bombs at the right place and time – and that is enough for disproportionate consequences to follow.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Stretford Young Conservatives (21 January 1977), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 168-171
1970s

Charles Darwin photo
Lewis Mumford photo

“I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Address to the National Book Awards Committee, published in My Works and Days (1979)

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Yet a man may love a paradox, without losing either his wit or his honesty.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Walter Savage Landor http://www.emersoncentral.com/walter_savage_landor.htm, from The Dial, XII (1841)

James Freeman Clarke photo

“He who believes in goodness has the essence of all faith. He is a man "of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows."”

James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) American theologian and writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 287.

Harun Yahya photo

“It is very astonishing that man, being a mortal, can still develop feelings of haughtiness.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

23 April 2013.
A9 TV addresses, 2013

John Bartholomew Gough photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box because of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech http://books.google.ca/books?id=zFclDyk2LTEC&pg=PA57#v=onepage&q&f=false (15 November 1867).
1860s

Thomas Jackson photo

“Wrong no man by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims

Antonin Scalia photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Sarah Dessen photo

“Man," he said. "You are, like, so impatient."”

Keeping the Moon (1999)

Edward Jenks photo
Adam Sandler photo
Colin Wilson photo
Tom Clancy photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
John Selden photo

“Wit and wisdom are born with a man.”

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

Learning.
Table Talk (1689)

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“The very same reason which one man may regard as a motive for taking care to prolong his life may be regarded by another man as a motive for shooting himself.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

H. G. Wells photo

“Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.”

Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (1943)

Bruno Schulz photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“There was a time when I should have felt terribly ashamed of not being up-to-date. I lived in a chronic apprehension lest I might, so to speak, miss the last bus, and so find myself stranded and benighted, in a desert of demodedness, while others, more nimble than myself, had already climbed on board, taken their tickets and set out toward those bright but, alas, ever receding goals of Modernity and Sophistication. Now, however, I have grown shameless, I have lost my fears. I can watch unmoved the departure of the last social-cultural bus—the innumerable last buses, which are starting at every instant in all the world’s capitals. I make no effort to board them, and when the noise of each departure has died down, “Thank goodness!” is what I say to myself in the solitude. I find nowadays that I simply don’t want to be up-to-date. I have lost all desire to see and do the things, the seeing and doing of which entitle a man to regard himself as superiorly knowing, sophisticated, unprovincial; I have lost all desire to frequent the places and people that a man simply must frequent, if he is not to be regarded as a poor creature hopelessly out of the swim. “Be up-to-date!” is the categorical imperative of those who scramble for the last bus. But it is an imperative whose cogency I refuse to admit. When it is a question of doing something which I regard as a duty I am as ready as anyone else to put up with discomfort. But being up-to-date and in the swim has ceased, so far as I am concerned, to be a duty. Why should I have my feelings outraged, why should I submit to being bored and disgusted for the sake of somebody else’s categorical imperative? Why? There is no reason. So I simply avoid most of the manifestations of that so-called “life” which my contemporaries seem to be so unaccountably anxious to “see”; I keep out of range of the “art” they think is so vitally necessary to “keep up with”; I flee from those “good times” in the “having” of which they are prepared to spend so lavishly of their energy and cash.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“Silence is Golden,” p. 55
Do What You Will (1928)

Nikolai Berdyaev photo
H.L. Mencken photo

“Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"Duty Before Security", The Smart Set, June 1919 http://books.google.com/books?id=ySscAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Women+have+a+hard+time+of+it+in+this+world+They+are+oppressed+by+man+made+laws+man+made+social+customs+masculine+egoism+the+delusion+of+masculine+superiority+Their+one+comfort+is+the+assurance+that+even+though+it+may+be+impossible+to+prevail+against+man+it+is+always+possible+to+enslave+and+torture+a+man%22&pg=RA1-PA49#v=onepage
"The Incomparable Buzzsaw", Prejudices: Second Series, Ch. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=hy47AAAAYAAJ&q=%22Women+have+a+hard+time+of+it+in+this+world+They+are+oppressed+by+man+made+laws+man+made+social+customs+masculine+egoism+the+delusion+of+masculine+superiority+Their+one+comfort+is+the+assurance+that+even+though+it+may+be+impossible+to+prevail+against+man+it+is+always+possible+to+enslave+and+torture+a+man%22&pg=PA237#v=onepage (1920)
1910s

“It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

Glorify his name!, The Root of the Righteous, Ch. 39.

Luís de Camões photo

“Ah! where shall weary man take sanctuary,
where live his little span of life secure?
and 'scape of Heaven serene th' indignant storms
that launch their thunders at us earthen worms?”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano,
Onde terá segura a curta vida,
Que não se arme, e se indigne o Céu sereno
Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno?
Stanza 106, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Francis Burton)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I

Richard Rodríguez photo

“Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this...? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Pearl S.  Buck photo
Elton John photo

“When are you gonna come down?
When are you going to land?
I should have stayed on the farm,
I should have listened to my old man.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Song lyrics, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)

Max Schmeling photo

“Joe Louis is the hardest puncher that I've ever seen… He's a good man. Anyone who plans on beating him had better know what they're doing.”

Max Schmeling (1905–2005) German boxer

Describing Joe's punching power. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/fight/peopleevents/p_louis.html

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“Then the white man hates him [the Native American], and hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image.”

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

"The Pilgrims of Plymouth" http://www.unz.org/Pub/BrainerdCephas-1901v02-00267 (Oration, December 22, 1855), in Cephas Brainerd and Eveline Warner Brainerd (eds), The New England Society Orations: Volume II. New York: The Century Co., 1901, p. 298.