Quotes about man
page 82

“The numerous people who imagine that a long stay in the Polar regions makes a man less susceptible of cold than other mortals are completely mistaken.”

Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) Norwegian polar researcher, who was the first to reach the South Pole

Sydpolen (The South Pole) (1912)

People, Imagination

“The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Fifth Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)

Men, Law, Nature, Problem

“Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)
Context: Every man lives in his neighborhood, and beyond his home and his job. To most men, except in the largest cities, the municipality is interpreted in terms of his neighborhood. Few men get beyond this except through occasional excursions into the larger world. America is a country of parallel neighborhoods; the native American in one section and the immigrant in another. Americanization is the elimination of the parallel line. So long as the American thinks that a house in his street is too good for his immigrant neighbor and tolerates discriminations in sanitation, housing, and enforcement of municipal laws, he can serve on all Americanization Committees that exist and still fail in his efforts. The immigrant neighborhood is often made up of people who have come from one province in the old country. Inevitably the culture of that neighborhood will be that of the old country; its language will persist and its traditions will flourish. It is not that we undervalue these, or desire to discredit them. But separated from the land and surroundings that gave them birth, from the history that cherishes them, they do not remain the strong, beautiful things they were on the other side. These aliens may retain some of the form of culture of the land of their birth long after its spirit has departed or has lost its savor in a new atmosphere. New opportunities, strange conditions, unforeseen adjustments, necessary sacrifices, and forces unseen and not understood affect the immigrant and his life here, and unless this culture is connected and fused with that of the new world, it loses its vitality or becomes corrupt.

Men, World, Law, Home

“A man should have the right to choose his own shoes.”

Neamat Imam book The Black Coat

The Black Coat (2013)

Shoe

“The habits of a man accustomed to command — especially on a foreign station, would necessarily be reserved and secluded. Not only accustomed to implicit obedience, but aware of its imperative necessity under the circumstances in which they have been placed, such are apt to expect it from all. Now, what is but the necessary authority in official life, and with man over man, seems harshness when extended to woman.”

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

Literary Remains

Life

“A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no longer indispensable.”

Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888–1957) Medal of Honor recipient and United States Navy officer

Source: Alone (1938), Ch. 12, last lines of the book.

Wisdom, Wise

“Each man does seek his own interest, but, unfortunately, not according to the dictates of reason.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter II, The First Image, p. 23

“I often said that never in the history of the world did one man receive so much faith and trust as Hitler. Similary, no one has ever betrayed so many people and abused so much good faith as he did.”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, May 24, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004 - Page 71

People, World, Faith, History

“It changes colour every time I do a film but I have this great guy called Rosario who works at a London salon called Hair Expressions who really knows what he’s doing. I’ve been told 80 times that I’ll have to have it all cut off because it’s ruined and then he fixes it. He’s the best hair man in the world.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

Sienna Guillory Interview by Jenni Baden Howard http://www.kappakoi.com/copy/archives/2007/06/sienna_guillory.html. The Sunday Times. 2001. Guillory speaks about coloring her hair for film roles.

World, Guy, Change, Time

“For the credit of muscular Christianity, one must say that it was not her weight, but the tumult in his own inner man, which made her bearer totter. Nevertheless, if one is wholly unused to the exercise, the carrying a healthy young English girl weighing a good eight stone, is as much as most men can conveniently manage.”

Thomas Hughes book Tom Brown at Oxford

Tom Brown is carrying his future wife, Mary Porter, who has sprained her ankle walking in the woods.
Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 34

Men, Exercises, Girl

“No doubt history will say that Eisenhower was a soldier. For my part, I will remember, above all, his goodness. He was a fundamentally good man who knew how to be loved by the Americans. I was fond of Ike.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 143
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On world leaders and statesmen

Love, History, Parting

“Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Food, Memory, Wine, Dead

“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/67/12267.html,vol. 1, letter 38

Truth, Nature, Bird, Singing

“One of the first things I did when I came on, I said, “I do not want this Kong to be a quadruped. I want him to stand upright, I want a throwback to the 1933 film where he is a biped, because he is a monster. He’s not just a big silverback gorilla, he’s a movie monster.” So I wanted to stand him upright, I wanted to make him tall, and part of that is because I wanted him to feel like this fusion between a god, a man, and a beast. I wanted to make him big enough that, if any of us stood at this table and we looked up at this thing, towered over us, how big does that thing have to be for the first thing that your brain says is, “That’s a god. I’m looking at a god.””

Jordan Vogt-Roberts (1984) American film director

Interview: Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts on Resurrecting an Icon for KONG: SKULL ISLAND http://dailydead.com/interview-director-jordan-vogt-roberts-on-resurrecting-an-icon-for-kong-skull-island/ (March 9, 2017)

God, Feeling, Parting

“I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)

Men, Thinking, Sense, Sleep

“whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

Men, Children, Truth, World

“I never yet have heard of a good man having fallen when he was trying to do Christ's will and trusting on Christ's help. Every fall without one exception came from venturing upon sinful ground or from venturing upon self-support.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 21.

Support, Help, Christ

“Now this error in attitude — mistaking these men for boys — permeates the whole scholastic domain, permeates it so thoroughly that it is hard for anyone within the domain to recognize it.
What do I mean by saying that a man is treated as a boy? I mean that he is told, the moment he arrives, that his secret dream of greatness is a pipe-dream; that it will be a long time before he makes a significant, personal contribution — if ever.
He is told this not with words. He is told this in a much more convincing way. He is shown, in everything that happens to him, that nobody could dream that he could make a significant, personal contribution.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

Generation of Greatness (1957)

Men, Secret, Dreams, Way

“Gett off - 23 positions in a 1 night stand.
Gett off - I'll only call u after if u say I can.
Gett off - let a woman be a woman and a man be a man.
Gett off - I u want 2 baby here I am”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Here I am
Gett Off
Song lyrics, Diamonds and Pearls (1991)

Baby, Night

“Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer 'immoral,' let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Dr. Whewell on Moral Philosophy (1852), in Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 2, London: John W. Parker and son, 1859, p. 485 https://books.google.it/books?id=w-I3AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA485

Pain, Pleasure, Animals, Selfishness

“Man cannot relish peace before
He has experienced a state of war.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Non conosce la pace e non l'estima
Chi provato non ha la guerra prima.
Canto XXXI, stanza 2 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

War, Peace

“Man is going to be displaced altogether as a specialist by the computer. Man himself is being forced to reestablish, employ, and enjoy his innate "comprehensivity." Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Universe

“By riverside are cooing
A pair of turtledoves;
A good young man is wooing
A maiden fair he loves.”

Xu Yuanchong (1921) Translator of Chinese poetry

The Book of Poetry, "A Fair Maiden"
Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (1994)

Love

“By a man’s boots, by his trouser knee, by his cuffs, by his coat tails, by all of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’ Words spoken there by Sherlock Holmes, I believe… although it may have been Westlife.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Other TV and web appearances, E4 Mind Control Night

“Each textbook must contain as frontispiece a portrait of Gandhiji and there must be lessons containing the sermons of Gandhiji from Sabarmati to Birla House. This would be the best and the most potent way of offering homage to the memory of the world's greatest man and the Father of the Indian Nation, and is better than building memorials and erecting statues…. His (Gandhiji's) teachings stressed the supreme virtue of the human spirit, utterly indestructible and unconquerable. India can never hope to find a place in the sun, unless it upholds the value of the human spirit.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

Raman on Mahatma Gandhi after whom he instituted the Gandhi Memorial Lecture in the Raman Research Institute quoted in Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman:A Legend of Modern India's Science, 22 November 2013, Official Government of India's website Vigyan Prasar http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm,

World, Hope, Way, Memory

“When a man counts one, two, three, he is not only doing mathematics, he is on the path to the mysticism of numbers in Pythagoras and Vitruvius and Kepler, to the Trinity and the signs of the Zodiac.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Mathematics

“Socialism believes in the elimination of the individual and in the destruction of competition. The people who wish to destroy the idea that the Government exists for each one of us, and not each one of us for the Government, are all in favor of these monopolies. For while they consider them present evils, they consider them working to the good of an established government in which the individual is lost, and every man belongs to the State, and has lost his individual manhood and freedom.”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

Earle, on John Stuart Mill, speaking of the socialistic doctrines. From Hearing Before the Committee on Interstate Commerce: United States Senate Sixty-second Congress pursuant to S. Res. 98 &c. (6 December 1911:793)

People, Idea, Freedom, Evil

“Always remember that if a man knows where he can make a dollar, he will not tell you about it; he will go after it himself.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p137.

“I believe that He was made man, joining the human nature with the divine in one person; being conceived by the singular operation of the Holy Ghost, and born of the blessed Virgin Mary, who, as well after as before she brought Him forth, continued a pure and unspotted virgin.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Letter to a Roman Catholic, July 18, 1749, The works of the Rev. John Wesley (1872), London, Wesleyan Conference Office, vol. X, p. 81. https://books.google.com/books?id=TZBKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA81&dq=%22continued+a+pure+and+unspotted+virgin%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn7srt5I_NAhUUU1IKHUlzC-AQ6AEIUTAH#v=onepage&q=%22continued%20a%20pure%20and%20unspotted%20virgin%22&f=false General sources

Nature, Personality

“A little in one's own pocket is better than much in another man's purse. 'Tis good to keep a nest egg. Every little makes a mickle.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 7.

“The history of technology will record that for the first time a machine of human construction, a five-and-a-half-ton missile, covered a distance of a hundred and twenty miles with a lateral deflection of only two and a half miles from the target. Your names, my friends and colleagues, are associated with this achievement. We did it with automatic control. From the artilleryman's point of view, the creation of the rocket as a weapon solves the problem of the weight of heavy guns. We are the first to have given a rocket built on the principles of aircraft construction a speed of thirty-three hundred miles per hour by means of rocket propulsion. Acceleration throughout the period of propulsion was no more than five times that of gravity, perfectly normal for maneuvering of aircraft. We have thus proved that it is quite possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft to fly at supersonic speed, given the right form and suitable propulsion. Our automatically controlled and stabilized rocket has reached heights never touched by any man-made machine. Since the tilt was not carried to completion our rocket today reached a height of nearly sixty miles. We have thus broken the world altitude record of twenty-five miles previously held by the shell fired from the now almost legendary Paris Gun.
The following points may be deemed of decisive significance in the history of technology: we have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time--mark this well--have used space as a bridge between two points on the earth; we have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. To land, sea, and air may now be added infinite empty space as an area of future intercontinental traffic, thereby acquiring political importance. This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel....
So long as the war lasts, our most urgent task can only be the rapid perfection of the rocket as a weapon. The development of possibilities we cannot yet envisage will be a peacetime task. Then the first thing will be to find a safe means of landing after the journey through space…”

Walter Dornberger (1895–1980) German general

[Dornberger, Walter, Walter Dornberger, V2--Der Schuss ins Weltall, 1952 -- US translation V-2 Viking Press:New York, 1954, Bechtle Verlag, Esslingan, p17,236]

War, World, Travel, History

“My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember. That's a pretty sweeping statement, and I know how phony it sounds. It sounds petulant and really fantastic, the kind of weapon kids always use when the old man won't come across with the car for your heavy date at the drive-in with Peggy Sue or when he tells you that if you flunk world history the second time through he's going to beat the living hell out of you. In this day and age when everybody thinks psychology is God's gift to the poor old anally fixated human race and even the president of the United States pops a trank before dinner, it's really a good way to get rid of those Old Testament guilts that keep creeping up our throats like the aftertaste of a bad meal we overate. If you say your father hated you as a kid, you can go out and flash the neighborhood, commit rape, or burn down the Knights of Pythias bingo parlor and still cop a plea… But it also means that no one will believe you if it's true. You're the little boy who cried wolf. And for me it's true…I don't think Dad himself really knew it until then. Even if you could dig to the very bottom of his motives, he'd probably say - at the most - that he was hating me for my own good.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

God, Hate, Age, World

“In the eyes of mercy, no one should have hateful thoughts. Feel pity for the man who is even more at fault. The area and size of mercy is limitless.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

Hate, Feeling

“Man differs from woman in size, bodily strength, hairyness, &c., as well as in mind, in the same manner as do the two sexes of many mammals.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter I: "The Evidence of the Descent of Man from some Lower Form", pages 13-14 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=26&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Sex

“Try to stay a man amongst men … There's no other hope for you.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Marianne to Raimon
All Men are Mortal (1946)

Men, Hope

“Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too.”

Robert A. Heinlein Job: A Comedy of Justice

Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)

Wisdom, Law

“Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way,
While meaner things, whom instinct leads,
Are rarely known to stray.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

"The Doves", line 1. (1780).

Way

“All white men are responsible for white oppression. It is much too easy to say, "Racism is not my fault," or "I am not responsible for the country's inhumanity to the black man. … But insofar as white do-gooders tolerate and sponsor racism in their educational institutions, their political, economic and social structures, their churches, and in every other aspect of American life, they are directly responsible for racism. … Racism is possible because whites are indifferent to suffering and patient with cruelty. Karl Jaspers' description of metaphysical guilt is pertinent here. "There exists among men, because they are men, a solidarity through which each shares responsibility for every injustice and every wrong committed in the world, and especially for crimes that are committed in his presence or of which he cannot be ignorant."”

James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian

Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), p. 24

Life, Men, World, Education

“The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Thackeray (1879), Ch. 2

Wealth

“In the Cabinet there were large Irish proprietors, and, without imputing to any proprietor a desire of doing injustice to his tenants, it was easy to understand that after the long continuance of the present state of the law in Ireland, proprietors were alarmed at any proposition coming to them like the Bill of the hon. Member for Rochdale. The Irish proprietors in the Cabinet, in that House, and out of it, were afraid of a Bill that would interfere with the powers and privileges that a Parliament of landowners for generations past had been conferring upon the proprietors of the soil. That was the point. The question was, could the cats wisely and judiciously legislate for the mice? He did not believe it. He was as much opposed as any man could be to transferring the land from the landlord to the tenant; but a measure of justice was due from the former to the latter, both in Ireland and in this country as well.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1852/feb/10/tenant-right-ireland in the House of Commons (10 February 1852). 1850s

Justice, Law, Cats, Understanding

“When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

In Star Science Fiction 5, edited by Frederik Pohl, p. 53
Short fiction, Company Store (1959)

“The man who truly loves his work returns to it after the briefest rest with a curious kind of voluptuousness. When he is completely absorbed in his job, the end of work seems like the end of life.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Love, Life

“To me, it has always been a matter of wonder that Christ said nothing as to the obligation man is under to his country, nothing as to the rights of the people as against the wish and will of kings, nothing against the frightful system of human slavery—almost universal in his time. What he did not say is altogether more wonderful than what he did say. It is marvelous that he said nothing upon the subject of intemperance, nothing about education, nothing about philosophy, nothing about nature, nothing about art. He said nothing in favor of the home, except to offer a reward to those who would desert their wives and families.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

People, Education, Family, Art

“[The Vijayanagar kings allowed] that every man may come and go, and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance, and without enquiring whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen. Great equity and justice is observed by all.”

Duarte Barbosa (1480–1545) Portuguese explorer and writer

The Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. I, p. 202. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2

Justice, Suffering

“He's the truest friend I've ever had. What's more, he's an exquisite man, full of kindness and sophistication, the most aristocratic aristocrat one can meet. To those who can't understand how I, a non-communist, could be friends with Zhou Enlai, I say: "But he's a prince more princely than I am!"”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

On Zhou Enlai, said during his exile in Peking, as quoted by Oriana Fallaci (June 1973), Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011). page 109.
Interviews

Understanding

“270. A Man among Children will be long a Child, a Child among Men will be soon a Man.”

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

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

Men, Children

“I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

No. 2, The Pines (1914) And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

God, Affliction

“Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 10, “Bomanz’s Story” (p. 497)

Time

“On Bill Clinton: "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal."”

Molly Ivins (1944–2007) American journalist

Introduction to You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You. Salon.com, The quotable Ivins http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/12/12/ivins_quotes/index.html, Dec. 12, 2000. Retrieved February 1, 2007.

Fools, Time

“Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.”

Thomas Browne book Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

Source: Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Chapter V

Life, Men, Time, Personality

“Villa could struggle to get fourth - and there’s stiff competition too from Liverpool, Everton…and, dare I say it…Man City!”

Simon Hill (1967) Australian television presenter

From Live Q&A with Simon Hill Fri 25 Jan 08
Quotes from His time at Foxsports

“I want to say something to the National Union of Students. When you choose to ally yourselves with an organisation like CAGE, which called Jihadi John a “beautiful young man” and told people to “support the jihad” in Iraq and Afghanistan, it really does, in my opinion, shame your organisation and your noble history of campaigning for justice.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on extremism (20 July 2015)

People, Justice, Beauty, History

“All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man — the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting" — will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Source: Physics and Politics https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4350 (1869), Ch. 5

Wisdom, Penalty, Time

“The great Carlyle has said that the best gift God ever gave to man was an eye that could really see; I venture to add that an equally rare and not less important gift is the courage to tell what one sees.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Garfield's Words (1882)

God, Courage

“Tut, man, decide promptly, but never give any reasons for your decisions. Your decisions may be right, but your reasons are sure to be wrong.”

William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1705–1793) British judge

When asked by an army officer, appointed governor of a west Indies island and who had no experience in law, how to apply the law. Quoted by John Cordy Jeaffreson in A Book About Lawyers http://books.google.com/books?id=lUpqPJSlBS8C&q=&quot;tut+man+decide+promptly+but+never+give+any+reasons+for+your+decisions+your+decisions+may+be+right+but+your+reasons+are+sure+to+be+wrong&quot;&pg=PA85#v=onepage, Volume 1 (1867).

Decision

“Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

Fear, Baby

“"Tell me who it is who brings about the re-birth (the revolutio)?" is asked of the wise Hermes. "God's Son, the only man, through the will of God," is the answer of the "heathen." "God's son" is the immortal spirit assigned to every human being. It is this divine entity which is the "only man," for the casket which contains our soul, and the soul itself, are but half-entities, and without its overshadowing both body and astral soul, the two are but an animal duad. It requires a trinity to form the complete "man," and allow him to remain immortal at every "re-birth," or revolutio, throughout the subsequent and ascending spheres, every one of which brings him nearer to the refulgent realm of eternal and absolute light.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IV

God, Soul, Birth, Light

“Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be.”

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) German theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar

Jämmerlich ist freilich jene praktische Philosophie der Franzosen und Engländer, von denen man meint, sie wüßten so gut, was der Mensch sei, unerachtet sie nicht darüber spekulierten, was er sein solle.
Cited in Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" (1798), § 355.

Failure, Knowledge

“Grand pappy told my pappy back in my day son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he'd done
Take all the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree
Round up all of them bad boys, hang them high in the street
For all the people to seeThat justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles, we'll sing a victory tune
And we'll all meet back at the local saloon.
We'll raise up our glasses against Evil forces singing
Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses.”

Toby Keith (1961) American country music singer and actor

Beer for My Horses, written with Scotty Emerick.
Song lyrics, Unleashed (2002)

Men, People, Justice, Boy

“Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
Woman: Yes, it is.
Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.
Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allen: What about Friday night?”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Play It Again, Sam (1972).

Love, Suicide, Universe, Night

“By the time of the Gettysburg Address, in November 1863, the North was fighting for a 'new birth of freedom' to transform the Constitution written by the founding fathers, under which the United States had become the world's largest slaveholding country, into a charter of emancipation for a republic where, as the northern version of 'The Battle Cry of Freedom' put it, 'Not a man shall be a slave.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson. The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom (2003)
2000s

World, Birth, Freedom, Time

“For, in fact, I say the degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakspeare's faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man's "intellectual nature," and of his "moral nature," as if these again were divisible, and existed apart. Necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance; we must speak, I am aware, in that way, if we are to speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works? All that a man does is physiognomical of him. You may see how a man would fight, by the way in which he sings; his courage, or want of courage, is visible in the word he utters, in the opinion he has formed, no less than in the stroke he strikes. He is one; and preaches the same Self abroad in all these ways.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Way, Error, Imagination, Courage

“Identical in the physical processes by which he originates—identical in the early stages of his formation—identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale—Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another—he differs from them as they differ from one another.—And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classification of animals now current among zoologists.”

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

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 83

Lie, Birth, Animals, Perfection

“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928).
Judicial opinions

Life, Men, Pain, Happiness

“Although no man is an island, you can make quite an effective raft out of six.”

Simon Munnery (1967) British comedian

Attention Scum! (2001), Episode One

“Nature is a Darwinian spectacle of the eaters and the eaten. All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite: sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption. The long pregnancy of the human female and the protracted childhood of her infant, who is not self-sustaining for seven years or more, have produced the agon of psychological dependency that burdens the male for a lifetime. Man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 16

Fear, Kiss, Nature, Childhood

“The human being, on the other hand, is firmly located in a temporal process. He has an image of the past which extends back far beyond the limits of his own life and experience, and he likewise has an image of the future. Closely associated with the time structure of his image is the image of the structure of relationships. Because we are aware of time, we are also aware of cause and effect, of contiguity and succession, of cycles and repetition. The image of man is also characterized by a much greater degree of self-consciousness and of self-awareness than that of the lower animals. We not only know, but we know that we know. This reflective character of the human image is unique, and is what leads to philosophy.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 25

Life, Time, Success, Past

“In the West, we have easier ways now to make a killing than killing. If Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral-pirate of Elizabethan England, were a young man today, would he emigrate to Somalia to get a start in the piracy industry? Of course not. He’d apply for a job at Goldman Sachs.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

Steven Pinker’s Peace Studies http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/steven-pinkers-peace-studies/, The American Conservative, October 31, 2011

Way

“It is man’s pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1980s

Fear, Motivation, Freedom

“The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.”

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. 241

“As man lives, and moves, and has his Being in the Divine Nature, and is supported by it, whether his Nature be good or bad; so the Wrath of Man, which was awakened in the dark Fire of his fallen Nature, may, in a certain Sense, be called the Wrath of God, as Hell itself may be said to be in God, because nothing can be out of his Immensity; yet this Hell, is not God, but the dark Habitation of the Devil. And this Wrath which may be called the Wrath of God, is not God, but the fiery Wrath of the fallen Soul.
And it was solely to quench this Wrath, awakened in the human Soul, that the Blood of the Son of God was necessary, because nothing but a Life and a Birth, derived from him into the human Soul, could change this darkened Root of a self-tormenting Fire, into an amiable Image of the holy Trinity, as it was at first created.
This was the Wrath, Vengeance, and vindictive Justice that wanted to be satisfied, in order to our Salvation; it was the Wrath and Fire of Nature and Creature kindled only in itself, by its departing from true Resignation, and Obedience to God.”

William Law (1686–1761) English cleric, nonjuror and theological writer

Christian Regeneration.
The Grounds and Reasons of Christian Regeneration (1739)

Life, God, Justice, Soul

“Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
Named of the four winds, North, South, East and West;
Portals that lead to an enchanted land…
Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage
And Honor honor, and the humblest man
Stand level with the highest in the law.
Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed
And with the vision brightening in their eyes
Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword.

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of Fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of Freedom.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Unguarded Gates; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Men, Fate, Children, Law

“Mentally speaking, it sucks, man. Who wants to prepare their whole life and have it all taken away by some guy who just made a bad pass? But that's the beauty of the sport as well. Anything can happen.”

Apolo Anton Ohno (1982) American short track speed skating competitor

On speedskating
Gordon, Devin (2006-01-23), "APOLO ANTON OHNO: SPEED SKATING". Newsweek. 147 (4):48

Life, Beauty, Guy, Sport

“Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus?'
'No.'
'Revolting. It alters one's whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Code of the Woosters

The Code of the Woosters (1938)

Nature

“… less real than such threats as a man with a gun, a woman with a knife, or a U. S. Senator with an idea.”

Dean Koontz book Brother Odd

Source: Brother Odd (2006), Chapter 38

Idea

“I prefer Buddhism because it gives three principles in combination, which no other religion does. Buddhism teaches prajna (understanding as against superstition and supernaturalism), karuna (love), and samara (equality). This is what man wants for a good and happy life. Neither god nor soul can save society.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

In an ""Why I like Buddhism and how it is useful to the world in its present circumstances" BBC (May 1956) http://www.ambedkar.org/Babasaheb/Why.htm

Love, Life, God, Happiness

“The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life.”

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) Italian patriot, politician and philosopher

Reported in ‎Thomas Jones, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (1915), page 61

Love, Life, Faith, Hope

“Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will —
The right thing happens to the happy man.”

Theodore Roethke book The Far Field

"The Right Thing," ll. 1-3
The Far Field (1964)

Happiness, Time

“Fate is not in man but around him.”

Albert Camus book A Happy Death

A Happy Death (1971)

Fate

“This evolution theory is the foundation philosophy for humanism. Humanism is the idea that man is God. After all, there is no God out there, so we must be God. The Bible says, "They did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind." Do humanists believe in a supreme being? Emphatically, yes, that supreme being is man. Humanists have no knowledge of any being more supreme. The turning point in history will be the moment that man becomes aware that the only God of man is man himself.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

God, History, Idea, Knowledge

“Today people want love. I can truly and sincerely tell you this Knowledge is over-brimmed with love. This Knowledge is, you know, I can't explain how much love it contains. There is so much love that if you take the water of the whole seas around and on one side we put this love and on the other side we put the whole sea, the sea will be small, the love will still be more. If we take every human man's weight, add it, then we add the love of his love, this Knowledge will be still much bigger than any man's weight. And this Knowledge is love. This is it. This is the love. A thief cannot take if from you, this love is so much. Nobody can cut this love. You can experience it whenever you like.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Central Hall, Westminster, London, UK, November 2, 1971
1970s

Love, People, Knowledge, Water

“The man who employs either his labour or his stock in a grater variety of ways than his situation renders necessary, can never hurt his neighbour by underselling him. He may hurt himself, and he generally does so. Jack of all trades will never be rich, says the proverb. But the law ought always to trust people with the care of their own interest, as in their local situations they must generally be able to judge better of it than the legislator can do.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter V, Digression, p. 572.

People, Law, Way, Hurt

“Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Cæsar Augustus
Roman Apophthegms

Men

“I emphatically call your attention to the obvious fact that the primitive Christian doctrine is a specific demand for the suicide of our race, which survived from the end of the Roman Empire to the present only because our ancestors, of fresh barbarian stock, simply ignored in practice a large part of the pernicious doctrine, especially in northern Europe under essentially aristocratic régimes. Until the disintegration of Protestantism made it possible for any ambitious tailor, clever confidence man, or disgruntled housewife to have "revelations" and pitch the woo at lower classes to make themselves important or fleece the suckers, the professional holy men either contented themselves with telling our people they were "sinful" or used the common devices of theologians to conceal the import of the holy book.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

Even so, however, the Catholic dervishes are obviously responsible for the eventual dominance of mestizos in "Latin" America, and many similar misfortunes.
The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, Confidence

“Man does not live by bread alone, nor guns, paperwork, theses, naked practicalities.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Gibraltar Falls (p. 118)
Time Patrol

“Sweet and gentle and sensitive man
With an obsessive nature and deep fascination
For numbers
And a complete infatuation with the calculation
Of π.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sea of Honey (Disc 1)

Nature

“I have read and re-read the Arusha Declaration and found nothing wrong with it except perhaps replacing a few commas here and there… it was clear for some of us that it would only be a mad man who would stand up and defend the Arusha Declaration.”

Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) Tanzanian politician and writer, first Prime Minister and President of Tanzania

Defending the Arusha Declaration, 1995. Culture of submission killing Africa - Soyinka http://thecitizen.co.tz/newe.php?id=12004

Reading, Madness

“The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic and inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central role in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the “economic” view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And if there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance—and this for two reasons: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man’s natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” p. 284.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Wisdom, Men, World

“Milo Venus was a beautiful lass,
She had the world in the palm of her hand.
But she lost both her arms in a wrestling match,
To get a brown eyed handsome man.”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Brown Eyed Handsome Man" (1958), Pop Chronicles Show 5 - Hail, Hail, Rock 'n' Roll: The rock revolution gets underway. Part 1 http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19751/m1/. Song lyrics

World, Beauty

“The human population growth over the last 2,000 years is well documented. The current population of seven billion could easily have come from eight people who got off Noah’s ark 4,400 years ago. If man had really been here four million years ago, like the evolutionists teach, why isn’t the earth stacked with people halfway to the moon?”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 39

People

“Yet there is a danger even greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

2000s, Speech at the Four Seasons, New York (25 September 2008)

Democracy, Imagination, Freedom, Light

“When a man is trying to sell you something, don't imagine he is that polite all the time.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p34.

Imagination, Time

“We form at La Faucille now a little colony where concord and happiness reign, and have not even for enemies the bears of the country... We are situated in a very movable manner, however, on one of the mountains of the Jura, where the inn is the most remarkable building. For I must tell you that we enjoy the company of an unaccountable old man of sixty, who resembles poor Father Colombert as if it were he himself. He is of the ancient nobility. He held the grade of General under the Restoration, having had possessions, which he has lost by the changes. He consoles himself now by carrying all his fortune. With him, a much rarer lot it consists in good humour and strength and philosophy. I have never seen a more excellent man. He is here to search for plants and stones.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

Quote in a letter to Rousseau's mother, from the Jura, 17th August, 1834; as cited in The Barbizon School of Painters: Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Millet, Daubigny, etc. , by D. C. Thomson; Scribner and Welford, New York 1890 – (copy nr. 78), pp. 111-112
1830 - 1850

Happiness, Search, Mountain, Change

“The winning of honor, is but the revealing of a man's virtue and worth, without disadvantage.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Honor and Reputation
Essays (1625)

“Men think it right to eat animals, because they are led to believe that God sanctions it. This is untrue. No matter in what books it may be written that it is not sinful to slay animals and to eat them, it is more clearly written in the heart of man than in any books that animals are to be pitied and should not be slain any more than human beings. We all know this if we do not choke the voice of our conscience.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

The Pathway of Life: Teaching Love and Wisdom (posthumous), Part I, International Book Publishing Company, New York, 1919, p. 68

Men, God, Books, Thinking

“Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united…. I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”

Hafez al-Assad (1930–2000) former president of Syria

6 Days War: Crucial quotes, 2010-6-28 http://www.sixdaywar.co.uk/crucial_quotes.htm, Arab Threats Against Israel, 2010-6-28 http://www.sixdaywar.org/content/threats.asp,

Time

“If man do not find in himself the required (or wished, or wanted, - "voulue", Fr.) force to accomplish his moral aspirations, he can try to purt himself in the conditions suitable to assist (or promote, or further, -"favoriser", Fr.) his self-control.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 50 [Spir rejected ascetism: for it is "opposed to sound reason to unnaturally impose onself extreme hardships"- Esquisse biographique, p. 32.