Quotes about many
page 33

Peter D. Schiff photo
Frank Herbert photo

“Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

"Introduction" to New World or No World (1970)
General sources

Fritjof Capra photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“Conscious of a strength which removes us from either fear or truculence, satisfied with dominions and resources which free us from lust of territory or empire, we see that our highest interest will be promoted by the prosperity and progress of our neighbors. We recognize that what has been accomplished here has largely been due to the capacity of our people for efficient cooperation. We shall continue prosperous at home and helpful abroad, about as we shall maintain and continually adapt to changing conditions the system under which we have come thus far. I mean our Federal system, distributing powers and responsibilities between the States and the National Government. For that is the greatest American contribution to the organization of government over great populations and wide areas. It is the essence of practical administration for a nation placed as ours is. It has become so commonplace to us, and a pattern by so many other peoples, that we do not always realize how great an innovation it was when first formulated, or how great the practical problems which its operation involves. Because of my conviction that some of these problems are at this time in need of deeper consideration, I shall take this occasion to try to turn the public mind in that direction.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

H.V. Sheshadri photo
Camille Paglia photo
Francis S. Collins photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.”

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 26

Ulysses S. Grant photo
Adam Ferguson photo
Alan Blinder photo
George W. Bush photo
Bart D. Ehrman photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Peter Hitchens photo

“Many of the things which New Labour were doing had in fact been presaged by John Major [Conservative PM 1990-97], who really was the first New Labour Prime Minister.”

Peter Hitchens (1951) author, journalist

2013-03-23
This house believes that New Labour ruined Britain
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUHNFY1ksPw
On John Major

H. G. Wells photo
Baltasar Gracián photo

“Many pleasant things are better when they belong to someone else. … When things belong to others, we enjoy them twice as much, without the risk of losing them, and with the pleasure of novelty.”

Muchas cosas de gusto no se han de poseer en propiedad. … Gózanse las cosas ajenas con doblada fruición, esto es, sin el riesgo del daño y con el gusto de la novedad.
Maxim 263
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

John Wesley photo

“It is true, likewise, that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions, as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it; and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread throughout the nation, in direct opposition not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best of men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not), that the giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible; and they know, on the other hand, that if but one account of the intercourse of men with separate spirits be admitted, their whole castle in the air (Deism, Atheism, Materialism) falls to the ground. I know no reason, therefore, why we should suffer even this weapon to be wrested out of our hands. Indeed there are numerous arguments besides, which abundantly confute their vain imaginations. But we need not be hooted out of one; neither reason nor religion require this.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Nehemiah Curnock, ed., 'The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M.', London, Charles H. Kelly, vol. 5, p. 265 https://archive.org/stream/a613690405wesluoft#page/265/mode/1up (entry of 25 May 1768)
General sources

Warren Zevon photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo

“This is my sixth attempt to introduce the Bill with the support of hon. Members and pensioner organisations all over Britain…Many statistics show the condition of elderly people. When the Social Security Act 1988 abolished supplementary benefit and what went with it, 30 per cent. of Britain's retired population were living on or below supplementary benefit levels. Despite the Government's claim that many elderly people are quite wealthy, at that time only 39 per cent. lived more than 140 per cent. above the level of supplementary benefit. In other words, at least 60 per cent. of Britain's elderly people live at a poor level, and 30 per cent. of them live below the poverty line. That is a scandal and the House should draw attention to it and enact my Bill to improve that situation…The Bill is a seven-point plan which, if carried into law, would change the face of Britain and eliminate poverty among the elderly… Britain is the seventh richest country in the world. It is a disgrace that so many elderly people die alone and in misery through hypothermia, not for lack of resources to provide for them, but for the lack of political will to distribute those resources to ensure that pensioners are well cared for and can live in decency in their retirement.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/jan/18/elimination-of-poverty-in-retirement in the House of Commons (18 January 1989).
1980s

Caldwell Esselstyn photo
John Gray photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Whoopi Goldberg photo

“For many, many, many years, there were not Jews in Israel. Okay?”

Whoopi Goldberg (1955) American actress

"My View on Helen Thomas, Israel and the Terror Flotilla" http://jewish.families.com/blog/my-view-on-helen-thomas-israel-and-the-terror-flotilla; as quoted by Miriam Metzinger, Families. com

“Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
And some are treasured for their markings –
They cause the eyes to melt
Or the body to shriek without pain.”

Craig Raine (1944) Poet

"A Martian Sends a Postcard Home", line 1; first published in The New Statesman, December 23 and 30, 1977.

Frank Sinatra photo

“If I had as many love affairs as you've given me credit for, I would now be speaking to you from a jar at the Harvard Medical School.”

Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American singer and film actor

Pop Chronicles: Show 22 - Smack Dab in the Middle on Route 66: A skinny dip in the easy listening mainstream. (Part 1) http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19775/m1/, 1965 https://archive.is/n1D2N.

Henry Ford photo
Josefa Iloilo photo
Colette photo
Thomas Brooks photo

“So many read good books and get nothing, because they read them over cursorily, slightly, superficially.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

A Mute Christian Under the Rod

Al Gore photo
Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) 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)

Adolph Freiherr Knigge photo

“In many matters children — not ensnared by dogmatism, passion, or erudition — judge far truer than adults.”

Über viele Dinge urteilen Kinder, von Systemgeist, Leidenschaft und Gelehrsamkeit unverführt, weit richtiger als Erwachsene.
Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788)

William Binney photo
Bernard Cornwell photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo
Robert LeFevre photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“Of course, there are many things to be said for the afternoon performance, chief among them being that it cuts in so generously on one’s work. p. 201”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 4: 1921

Poul Anderson photo

“I walk beyond town, many of these nights, to stand under the high autumnal stars, look upward and wonder.”

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 16 (p. 176; closing words)

Lauren Bacall photo
Nicholas Wade photo
Margaret Mead photo
Marc Chagall photo
Mahmud of Ghazni photo
Larry Hogan photo
F. Anstey photo
Theodor Mommsen photo

“After Rome had acquired the undisputed mastery of the world, the Greeks were wont to annoy their Roman masters by the assertion, that Rome was indebted for her greatness to the fever, of which Alexander of Macedon died at Babylon on the 11th of June, 323. As it was not very agreeable for them to reflect on the actual past, they were fond of allowing their thoughts to dwell on what might have happened, had the great king turned his arms towards the west, and contested the Carthaginian supremacy by sea with his fleet, and the Roman supremacy by land with his phalanxes. It is not impossible that Alexander may have cherished such thoughts; nor is it necessary to resort for such an explanation of their origin to the mere difficulty which an autocrat provided with soldiers and ships experiences in setting limits to his warlike career. It was an enterprise worthy of a great Greek king to protect the siceliots against Carthage and the Tarentines against Rome.. and the Italian embassies from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans, that long with numerous others made their appearance at Babylon, afforded him sufficient opportunities of becoming acquainted with the circumstances of the peninsula, and of contracting relations with it. Carthage with is many connections in the east could not but attract the attention of the mighty monarch, and it was probably part of his design to convert the nominal sovereignty of the Persian king over the Tyrian colony into a real one: the apprehensions of the Carthaginians are shown by the Phoenician spy in the suite of Alexander. Whether, however, those ideas were dreams or actual projects, the king died without having interfered in the affairs of the west, and his ideas were buried with him. For a few brief years a Grecian ruler had held in his hands the whole intellectual vigour of the Hellenic race combined with the whole material resources of the east. On his death the work to which his life had been devoted - the establishment of a Hellenism in the east - was by no means undone; but his empire had barely been united when it was again dismembered, and, admidst the constant quarrels of the different states that were formed out of its ruins, the object of world-wide interest which they were destined to promote - the diffusion of Greek culture in the east - though not abandoned, was prosecuted on a feeble and stunted scale.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 1., Page 394 - 395. Translated by W.P.Dickson.
The History of Rome - Volume 1

MS Dhoni photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo

“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

Bashō Matsuo photo

“The summer grasses—
For many brave warriors
The aftermath of dreams.”

夏草や
兵どもが
夢の跡
natsukusa ya
tsuwamonodomo ga
yume no ato
Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, New York, 1999, p. 316 (Translation: Donald Keene)
The summer grasses—
Of brave soldiers' dreams
The aftermath.
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, Tokyo, 1996, p. 87 (Translation: Donald Keene)
Also: Classical Japanese Database, Translation #222 http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/222
Oku no Hosomichi

Octavia E. Butler photo
Henry James photo
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

Joseph Gordon-Levitt photo
Alfred Kinsey photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Robert Burton photo

“Many things happen between the cup and the lip.”

Section 2, member 3, Air rectified. With a digression of the Air.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part II

Jessica Lange photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Christopher Monckton photo
Kapil Dev photo
Ibn Battuta photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Paul Klee photo
Aldo Capitini photo
John Calvin photo
Theodore Kaczynski photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
John Rogers Searle photo
Harold Wilson photo
Sukarno photo
Charles Evans Hughes photo

“Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in actions under libel laws providing for redress and punishment, and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers and periodicals. The general principle that the constitutional guaranty of the liberty of the press gives immunity from previous restraints has been approved in many decisions under the provisions of state constitutions. The importance of this immunity has not lessened. While reckless assaults upon public men, and efforts to bring obloquy upon those who are endeavoring faithfully to discharge official duties, exert a baleful influence and deserve the severest condemnation in public opinion, it cannot be said that this abuse is greater, and it is believed to be less, than that which characterized the period in which our institutions took shape. Meanwhile, the administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious proportions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, emphasizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press, especially in great cities. The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

“That is a complete waste of your time and the government's money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text.”

Lees's response when informed that Nelson Francis had received a grant to produce the Brown Corpus.
Biber, D., and E. Finegan. 1991. "On the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies." In K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 204-220. London: Longman.

Arthur Kekewich photo
José María Aznar photo

“Catalan language is one of the most complete and perfect expressions that I know from the point of view regarding language, I not only read it since many years ago, but I understand it. Moreover, I speak it intimately too.”

José María Aznar (1953) Spanish President from 1996 to 2004

On an interview with the Catalan Autonomous Television, just before politically coallitioning with Catalan, Canarian and Basque nationalists
Source: L' Aznar destrossant la llengua catalana http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m95BZOKDPs, December 2006.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“To know, to esteem, to love, and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

On taking Leave of ———— (1817)
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo