Quotes about man
page 77

Dwight D. Eisenhower photo
Baba Amte photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Andrei Sakharov photo
John Ruskin photo
Amir Taheri photo

“The Shah's vision of the ideal form of government was not so far removed from that of Mossadeq. In that ideal model one man, the king, prime minister or Pishva [Führer] would act as the guardian of the nation's highest interests. The Pishva, because he loves his people, could never do anything that might not be good for the people and the country. He might sacrifice the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. But he would never harm 'the people' or 'the nation' as a whole. Mossadeq's version of the same model envisaged a role for crowds, political groups - though not for political parties - and religious associations whose task was to support the Pishva by fighting his opponents and making him feel loved and cherished. In the Shah's model, the Pishva's decisions were to be carried out exclusively through the bureaucracy with the armed forces always ready to crush any opposition. All that was left for 'the nation' to do was applaud the Pishva and make him feel good. Mossadeq and the Shah advanced exactly the same argument in defence of their respective models: Iran, being constantly prey to the devilish appetite of the rapacious foreign powers, the influence of the ajnabi (foreigners), multiplying the centres of political power would allow the ajnabi to infiltrate the nation's structures. Neither man could invisage a situation in which different sections of the Iranian society might, for reasons of their own, oppose the Leader. They could conceive of no circumstances in which an opposition movement could emerge without foreign backing and intrigue.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

George Holmes Howison photo

“Before it can be said, then, that human freedom and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme Reason are really reconciled, we must have found some way of harmonising the eternity of the human spirit with the creative and regenerative offices of God. The sense of their antagonism is nothing new. Confronted with the race-wide fact of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any but a temporal being; quite as the common-sense of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limitations of the sensory life, proclaims the mere finitude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because the price of their being real is the attributing to man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite! merely finite!" is the steadfast cry of the old theology and of the plodding common realist alike; and, sad to say, of most of historic philosophy too. And the old theology, with more penetrating consistency than the realistic ordinary man or the ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindication of the Divine Sovereignty from all human encroachment by denying the freedom of man altogether.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.330-1

Joe Bob Briggs photo

“The man is ugly, the man is evil, and the man is in love. This is gonna be an American classic.”

Joe Bob Briggs (1953) American film critic, writer, and actor; alter ego of John Bloom

Darkman review http://www.joebobbriggs.com/drivein/1990/darkman.htm

Plutarch photo

“Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Of Hearing, 6
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man.”

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Five, Christian sources, p. 82

Thomas Hobbes photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo

“I think that Man in creating God somewhat overestimated his abilities.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

aphorism used in mRIF http://monochrom.at/mrif

Isaac Barrow photo
Stendhal photo

“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”

Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route. Et l’homme qui porte le miroir dans sa hotte sera par vous accusé‚ d’être immoral ! Son miroir montre la fange, et vous accusez le miroir! Accusez bien plutôt le grand chemin où est le bourbier, et plus encore l’inspecteur des routes qui laisse l’eau croupir et le bourbier se former.
Vol. II, ch. XIX
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Thomas Little Heath photo
Babe Ruth photo

“Yes, he's a prick, but he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit!”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

About Ty Cobb, a notoriously vicious player. Quoted in The Sporting News (12 July 1950); as actually published in The Sporting News, "prick" was replaced by "[censored]" — elsewhere, including Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America's National Pastime (1994) the quote has appeared as "Ty Cobb is a prick." or sometimes "Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit."

Leo Tolstoy photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Letter to Arthur Greeves (February 1932) — in They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963) (1979), p. 439

Oliver P. Morton photo
Simone Weil photo
Julius Streicher photo

“We handed the most important belongings of our people -- the railroads and the banks -- to aliens who 2000 years ago had turned the temple into a house of usury. Back then there was a man who had the bravery to drive out these scoundrels with a whip! If today a national socialist is seen with such a temple-whip, he's thrown into jail.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Wir haben unsere wichtigsten Volksgüter, die Eisenbahnen und die Banken, den Fremdlingen überlassen, die schon vor 2000 Jahren den Tempel zu einem Wucherhaus gemacht haben. Damals hatte schon einer den Mut besessen, mit einer Peitsche dieses Gesindel auszutreiben! Wenn heute ein Nationalsozialist mit einer solchen Tempelpeitsche angetroffen wird, wird er ins Gefängnis geworfen.
05/01/1925, speech in the Bavarian regional parliament; debate about the budget of the ministry of justice ("Kampf dem Weltfeind", Stürmer publishing house, Nuremberg, 1938)

William Carlos Williams photo

“So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Poetry Chicago, 1916)
Marriage (1916)

William Gibson photo
George Chapman photo

“Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman's counsel; her wing'd spirit
Is feather'd oftentimes with heavenly words.”

The Gentleman Usher, Act IV, scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Anthony Burgess photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Gustavo Gutiérrez photo
Michael Foot photo

“The only man I knew who could make a curse sound like a caress.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Aneurin Bevan, Vol 1, 1962
1960s

Albert Einstein photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
James Russell Lowell photo

“No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.”

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

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 2 “Palaces” (p. 79)

Seneca the Younger photo

“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it.”
Nulli potest secura vita contingere qui de producenda nimis cogitat.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter IV: On the terrors of death, Line 4.

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.”

Nous [les hommes] valons moins que vous
les femmes
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 9: A Husband's Triumph

Kazimir Malevich photo
George D. Herron photo
Josh Billings photo

“I don't rekoleckt now ov ever hearing ov two dogs fiteing unless thare waz a man or two around.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

William Jennings Bryan photo
Jacques Derrida photo
William Morley Punshon photo

“Let a man be firmly principled in his religion, he may travel from the tropics to the poles, it will never catch cold on the journey.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 501.

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“1345. Drunkenness turns a Man out of himself, and leaves a Beast in his room.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Iain Banks photo

““You’re a wicked man.”
“Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.””

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Eleven (p. 355).

Thomas Brooks photo

“There is no such way to attain to greater measures of grace, as for a man to live up to that little grace he has.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

Quotes from secondary sources, Smooth Stones Taken From Ancient Brooks, 1860

Fred Dibnah photo

“A man who says he feels no fear is either a fool or a liar.”

Fred Dibnah (1938–2004) English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering

Unsourced

Bob Dylan photo

“How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn't see?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Blowin' in the Wind

“A gentleman is a man who never hurts anybody else unintentionally.”

Herbert Farjeon (1879–1972) American playwright, theater manager, critic, and researcher (1887–1945)

Herbert Farjeon's Cricket Bag

Alfred Kinsey photo
Alfred Stieglitz photo
Max Euwe photo

“Alekhine is a poet who creates a work of art out of something that would hardly inspire another man to send home a picture post card.”

Max Euwe (1901–1981) Dutch chess Grandmaster, mathematician, and author

Max Euwe, in: Fred Reinfeld (1956) Why You Lose at Chess, p. 180.

George Gissing photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Richard Maurice Bucke photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“Each brotherly compassion that man hath on his fellow Christians, with charity, it is Christ in him.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 28
Variant: Each kind compassion that man hath on his even-Christians with charity, it is Christ in him.

Henry George photo

“Men must have rights before they can have equal rights. Each man has a right to use the world because he is here and wants to use the world. The equality of this right is merely a limitation arising from the presence of others with like rights. Society, in other words, does not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any individual, the right to the use of land. That right exists before society and independently of society, belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing only with his death.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Part I : Declaration, Ch. IV : Mr. Spencer's Confusion as to Rights
A Perplexed Philosopher (1892)
Context: Men must have rights before they can have equal rights. Each man has a right to use the world because he is here and wants to use the world. The equality of this right is merely a limitation arising from the presence of others with like rights. Society, in other words, does not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any individual, the right to the use of land. That right exists before society and independently of society, belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing only with his death. Society itself has no original right to the use of land. What right it has with regard to the use of land is simply that which is derived from and is necessary to the determination of the rights of the individuals who compose it. That is to say, the function of society with regard to the use of land only begins where individual rights clash, and is to secure equality between these clashing rights of individuals.

Robert Crumb photo
William Hazlitt photo

“No young man believes he shall ever die.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Halldór Laxness photo

“A married man has only one duty towards his wife in order to make her happy, and that is to ensure that she is constantly pregnant, and with a child in her arms.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

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

F. H. Bradley photo

“True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.”

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) British philosopher

No. 10.
Aphorisms (1930)

Charles Darwin photo

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

" Notebook C http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1838), pp. 196–197; also quoted in Charles Darwin: a scientific biography (1958) by Sir Gavin De Beer, p. 208
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements

Wallace Stevens photo

“A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

Kazimir Malevich photo
Immanuel Kant photo

“The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men…”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

What is Enlightenment? (1784)

Rollo May photo
Yuvan Shankar Raja photo

“A man must either fall or rise in adversity.”

Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer

The cloud walker (1973)

André Maurois photo
James Branch Cabell photo
Simone Weil photo
Daniel J. Boorstin photo

“The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Introduction, part 2: The Influence of America on the Mind, p. 6.
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

Swapan Dasgupta photo

“The blind man carries a star on his shoulders.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

El hombre ciego lleva una estrella sobre sus hombros,
Voces (1943)

Harold Wilson photo
Max Scheler photo

“"Among the types of human activity which have always played a role in history, the soldier is least subject to ressentiment. Nietzsche is right in pointing out that the priest is most exposed to this danger, though the conclusions about religious morality which he draws from this insight are inadmissible. It is true that the very requirements of his profession, quite apart from his individual or national temperament, expose the priest more than any other human type to the creeping poison of ressentiment. In principle he is not supported by secular power; indeed he affirms the fundamental weakness of such power. Yet, as the representative of a concrete institution, he is to be sharply distinguished from the homo religiosus—he is placed in the middle of party struggle. More than any other man, he is condemned to control his emotions (revenge, wrath, hatred) at least outwardly, for he must always represent the image and principle of “peacefulness.” The typical “priestly policy” of gaining victories through suffering rather than combat, or through the counterforces which the sight of the priest's suffering produces in men who believe that he unites them with God, is inspired by ressentiment. There is no trace of ressentiment in genuine martyrdom; only the false martyrdom of priestly policy is guided by it. This danger is completely avoided only when priest and homo religiosus coincide."”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Sukarno photo
Florence Nightingale photo
Sarah Kofman photo
Seneca the Younger photo

“I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind.”
Oculis de homine non credo, habeo melius et certius lumen quo a falsis uera diiudicem: animi bonum animus inueniat.

De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 2, line 2
Alternate translation: I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man. (translator unknown).
Moral Essays

Piero Scaruffi photo

“If the cop honestly felt that this was a young black man (as politically incorrect as it sounds, this is the most violent category of people in the USA) aiming a gun at him, the cop can hardly be blamed for shooting first.”

Piero Scaruffi (1955) Italian writer

Of heroes and thugs: African-American males and white cops http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/usa14.html#usa1214

Lorenzo Snow photo

“As man now is, God once was:
As God now is, man may be.”

Lorenzo Snow (1814–1901) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Nature of God (see also: God in Mormonism)
http://lds.org/ensign/1982/02/i-have-a-question/i-have-a-question?lang=eng
Is President Lorenzo Snow’s oft-repeated statement—“As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be”—accepted as official doctrine by the Church?
I Have a Question
Lund, Gerald N.
February
1982
Ensign

Diogenes Laërtius photo

“Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he was dying in a foreign land, "The descent to Hades is the same from every place."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Anaxagoras, 6.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Ken Ham photo
Frederick Douglass photo
Charles Babbage photo
James Frazer photo
Glen Cook photo