Quotes about many
page 36

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley photo
Thomas Merton photo
Paolo Veronese photo

“I had not thought that I was doing wrong; I had never taken so many things into consideration.”

Paolo Veronese (1523–1588) Italian painter of the Renaissance

Testimony to the Inquisition, (1573)

Avigdor Lieberman photo

“People can choose between the sweet lie or the bitter truth. I say the bitter truth, but many people don't want to hear it.”

Avigdor Lieberman (1958) Israeli politician

Answer to "Why are you always perceived as the bad guy?" "Spiegel Interview" http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,684789-4,00.html

Mark Kac photo
Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Ron Paul photo
Harry Chapin photo
Thomas Bradwardine photo
Richard Stallman photo
Pablo Neruda photo

“I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,
as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,
stiff with cold, dying with pain.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

No quiero para mí tantas desgracias.
No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba,
de subterráneo solo, de bodega con muertos
ateridos, muriéndome de pena.
Walking Around, Residencia II (Residence II), II, stanza 4-5.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
I do not want for myself so many misfortunes.
I do not want to continue as root and tomb,
just underground, a vault with corpses
stiff with cold, dying of distress.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

John Dryden photo
John Gray photo
James A. Michener photo
Li Hongzhi photo

“Although Qigong has been spread for quite a long period of time, several decades already, no one knows its real implications. Therefore, I have written in the book, Zhuan Falun, everything about certain phenomena in the Qigong community, why Qigong is spread in ordinary human society, and what the ultimate goal of Qigong is. Therefore, this book is a systematic work that enables one to practice cultivation. Through reading it repeatedly, many people feel that there is something unique about the book: no matter how many times you have read this book, you always seem to feel a sense of freshness, and no matter how many times you have read it, you always attain a different understanding from the same sentence, and no matter how many times you have read it, you always feel that there is still a great deal of content in it that is yet to be found. Why is it this way, then? It is because that I have systematically compiled many things that are considered heavenly secrets within this book, such as that people are able to practice cultivation, how cultivation should be practiced, and the characteristics of this universe, etc. For a practitioner, it can enable him to complete his cultivation practice successfully. Because no one has ever done such a thing in the past, when reading this book, many people find that a lot of the contents are heavenly secrets. After races are mixed up, you will find one's child born to be an infant of mixed blood. However, there is a partition in the middle of this child's life. If it is separated, he will be physically and intellectually incomplete or a person with an incomplete body. Modern science also knows that it is getting worse one generation after another. It would be like this”

Li Hongzhi (1951) Chinese religious leader and dissident

Falun Buddha Fa Lecture in Sydney http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/1996L.html

Benjamin Mkapa photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“Plato affirmed that the soul was immortal and clothed in many bodies successively.”

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

Plato, 40.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 3: Plato

Michel De Montaigne photo

“How many worthy men have we seen survive their own reputation!”

Book II, Ch. 16. Of Glory
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

Don DeLillo photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
William C. Davis photo
Ron Paul photo
Brooks Adams photo
Muhammad bin Tughluq photo
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo
Alice A. Bailey photo
Aron Ra photo

“Yes, it is absurd [to say that without God, murder is permissible], because even according to your sacred fables Moses murdered an Egyptian and then looked around to make sure no one saw him before trying to conceal the body, and the same goes for the myth of Cain and Abel, where Cain lied about killing his brother. Both of these characters obviously already knew that murder was wrong a long time before the story of the Ten Commandments, and this might be because Hammurabi had already established the code of law many centuries earlier than these myths found their way into the Bible, or it might be that, like most social animals, even superstitious savages understood that you shouldn't kill or maim other members of your own society (unless your religion commands it). One minute, God supposedly says "thou shalt not kill", and the next minute He orders His own people to kill every man and his brother, except of course for Moses's brother who really should have been the only one who was killed in that story. But somehow he was spared and promoted to priest instead; saved by nepotism. Then God told them all to kill all their neighbors, every man, woman and child, including the infants and the unborn. But the fact is that murder is still wrong, regardless of what God has to say about it, and there is still no justification when God allegedly commands His prophets to plunder communities and commit genocide.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

Vincent Van Gogh photo

“. You would also be mistaken if you [Theo] thought that I would do well to follow your advice literally, of becoming an engraver of bill-headings and visiting cards, or a bookkeeper or a carpenter's apprentice, - or else to devote myself to the baker's trade, - or many similar things.... that other people advise me.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In his letter to brother Theo, from Wasmes, Belgium, 15 October 1879; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 132), p. 19
1870s

George Klir photo
Gerard Bilders photo

“Many paintings are on their way, several half finished, others almost varnished and signed at the bottom. An important point is how a painting succeeds at last; an equally important point is when, how and to whom it is sold. Of these three points, the 'when', at least at this moment, is the most important for me. Then the 'how', in the sense of 'how much' [money]. To 'whom', is a question of wealth or wanton, as someone who had nothing to eat for a long time and then start to think, at whose costs am I going to fill my stomach... How mean! Painters are inferior people. Harsh!”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands: Veel schilderijen staan op stapel, verscheidene half gereed, de andere bijna vernist, met de naam eronder. Een voornaam punt is hoe een schilderij uitvalt, een even voornaam punt wanneer, hoe en aan wie het verkocht wordt. Van deze drie punten is het 'wanneer', op dit ogenblik tenminste, voor mij weer het voornaamste. Vervolgens het 'hoe', in de zin van 'hoeveel'. Aan 'wie', is weelde of brooddronkenheid, als van iemand die lange tijd niets te eten heeft gehad en er dan nog over gaat denken, bij wie hij het liefst zijn buik gaat vullen.. ..Hoe gemeen! Schilders zijn geringe lui. Hard!
Source: 1860's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), p. 36 - quote from Bilders' diary, 5 March 1860, (Amsterdam)

Cotton Mather photo

“Your Knowledge has Qualified You to make those Reflections on the following Relations, which few can Think, and tis not fit that all should See. How far the Platonic Notions of Demons which were, it may be, much more espoused by those primitive Christians and Scholars that we call The Fathers, than they see countenanced in the ensuing Narratives, are to be allowed by a serious man, your Scriptural Divinity, join'd with Your most Rational Philosphy, will help You to Judge at an uncommon rate. Had I on the Occasion before me handled the Doctrin of Demons, or launced forth into Speculations about magical Mysteries, I might have made some Ostentation, that I have read something and thought a little in my time; but it would neither have been Convenient for me, nor Profitable for those plain Folkes, whose Edification I have all along aimed at. I have therefore here but briefly touch't every thing with an American Pen; a Pen which your Desert likewise has further Entitled You to the utmost Expressions of Respect and Honor from. Though I have no Commission, yet I am sure I shall meet with no Crimination, if I here publickly wish You all manner of Happiness, in the Name of the great Multitudes whom you have laid under everlasting Obligations. Wherefore in the name of the many hundred Sick people, whom your charitable and skilful Hands have most freely dispens'd your no less generous than secret Medicines to; and in the name of Your whole Countrey, which hath long had cause to believe that you will succeed Your Honourable Father and Grandfather in successful Endeavours for our Welfare; I say, In their Name, I now do wish you all the Prosperity of them that love Jerusalem. And whereas it hath been sometimes observed, That the Genius of an Author is commonly Discovered in the Dedicatory Epistle, I shall be content if this Dedicatory Epistle of mine, have now discovered me to be,
(Sir) Your sincere and very humble Servant,
C. Mather.”

Cotton Mather (1663–1728) American religious minister and scientific writer

“Too many people go through life without pausing to enjoy what they have.”

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 2

András Petőcz photo

“When their lordships asked Bacon How many bribes he had taken He had at least the grace To get very red in the face.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

"Bacon", in Baseless Biography (1939), p. 6.

Gloria Estefan photo

“All of us know the true meaning of freedom. Some of us appreciate it more than those who have been here for many generations.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.orlandosentinel.com (July 5, 2007)
2007, 2008

Edwin Abbott Abbott photo

“On the whole we get on pretty smoothly in our domestic relations, except in the lower strata of the Military Classes. There the want of tact and discretion on the part of the husbands produces at times indescribable disasters. Relying too much on the offensive weapons of their acute angles instead of the defensive organs of good sense and seasonable simulation, these reckless creatures too often neglect the prescribed construction of the women's apartments, or irritate their wives by ill-advised expressions out of doors, which they refuse immediately to retract. Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre; not, however, without its advantages, as it eliminates the more brutal and troublesome of the Isosceles; and by many of our Circles the destructiveness of the Thinner Sex is regarded as one among many providential arrangements for suppressing redundant population, and nipping Revolution in the bud.

Yet even in our best regulated and most approximately Circular families I cannot say that the ideal of family life is so high as with you in Spaceland. There is peace, in so far as the absence of slaughter may be called by that name, but there is necessarily little harmony of tastes or pursuits; and the cautious wisdom of the Circles has ensured safety at the cost of domestic comfort.”

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 4. Concerning the Women

Muammar Gaddafi photo
Newton Lee photo

“Too many people prefer to stay inside their own comfort zones with a one-sided liberal or conservative sentiment, creating their own information silos.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016
Variant: Too many people prefer to stay inside their own comfort zones with a one-sided liberal or conservative sentiment.

George Lucas photo

“One of the amazing things about 'Seven Samurai' is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you've got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

George Lucas, in Marc Lee Film-makers on film: George Lucas http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/3642010/Film-makers-on-film-George-Lucas.html, The Telegraph, 14 May 2005
2000s

Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Colin Wilson photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Steve Jobs photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!”

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

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Bernie Sanders photo

“Enough is enough! […] How many homes can you own?”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Regarding Opposing Extending Bush-era tax rates, [Memoli, Michael, Sen. Bernie Sanders ends filibuster, http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/dec/10/news/la-pn-sanders-filibuster-20101211, 10 December 2010, Los Angeles Times, 16 October 2013]
2010s

Alice A. Bailey photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Dorothy L. Sayers photo
Hans Fritzsche photo

“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

Simon Phipps photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo
Paavo Haavikko photo
Austen Chamberlain photo
George Bernard Shaw photo

“Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1910s, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

John Heywood photo

“Many handis make light warke.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Many hands make light work.
Part II, chapter 5.
Proverbs (1546)
Variant: Many hands make light work.

Christopher Reeve photo
Alfred de Zayas photo
Gabrielle Roy photo
Subcomandante Marcos photo
Erik Naggum photo
Gloria Estefan photo
George H. W. Bush photo
Andy Warhol photo
Charles Darwin photo

“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.”

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)

Oriana Fallaci photo

“To make you cry I’ll tell you about the twelve young impure men I saw executed at Dacca at the end of the Bangladesh war. They executed them on the field of Dacca stadium, with bayonet blows to the torso or abdomen, in the presence of twenty thousand faithful who applauded in the name of God from the bleachers. They thundered "Allah akbar, Allah akbar." Yes, I know: the ancient Romans, those ancient Romans of whom my culture is so proud, entertained themselves in the Coliseum by watching the deaths of Christians fed to the lions. I know, I know: in every country of Europe the Christians, those Christians whose contribution to the History of Thought I recognize despite my atheism, entertained themselves by watching the burning of heretics. But a lot of time has passed since then, we have become a little more civilized, and even the sons of Allah ought to have figured out by now that certain things are just not done. After the twelve impure young men they killed a little boy who had thrown himself at the executioners to save his brother who had been condemned to death. They smashed his head with their combat boots. And if you don’t believe it, well, reread my report or the reports of the French and German journalists who, horrified as I was, were there with me. Or better: look at the photographs that one of them took. Anyway this isn’t even what I want to underline. It’s that, at the conclusion of the slaughter, the twenty thousand faithful (many of whom were women) left the bleachers and went down on the field. Not as a disorganized mob, no. In an orderly manner, with solemnity. They slowly formed a line and, again in the name of God, walked over the cadavers. All the while thundering Allah–akbar, Allah–akbar. They destroyed them like the Twin Towers of New York. They reduced them to a bleeding carpet of smashed bones.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

Rage and the Pride">

Thomas Sowell photo

“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Random Thoughts http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2007/09/03/random_thoughts?page=full&comments=true, Sep 03, 2007
2000s

Ann Leckie photo
Oliver Goldsmith photo

“And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.”

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 17, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, st. 4.

“Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Clive Hamilton photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
James Comey photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo
Anders Fogh Rasmussen photo

“I was deeply distressed that the cartoons were seen by many Muslims as an attempt by Denmark to mark and insult or behave disrespectfully towards Islam or Mohammed.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen (1953) former Prime Minister of Denmark and NATO secretary general

In relation to the Danish cartoon affair http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/5115171/Rasmussen-to-give-Turkey-senior-posts-in-Nato.html (6 April 2009)

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present). Under a curious delusion, the one cries out incessantly that he has surpassed the other, just as the Copenhageners, with philosophic visage, go out to Dyrehausen "in order to see and observe," without remembering that they themselves become objects for the others, who have also gone out simply to see and observe. Thus there is the continuous leap-frogging of one over the other — "on the basis of the immanent negativity of the concept", as I heard a Hegelian say recently, when he pressed my hand and made a run preliminary to jumping. — When I see someone energetically walking along the street, I am certain that his joyous shout, "I am coming over," is to me — but unfortunately I did not hear who was called (this actually happened); I will leave a blank for the name, so everyone can fill in an appropriate name.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Journals IA 328, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Jean-François Revel photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo
Rajiv Malhotra photo
Basil of Caesarea photo
William Stanley Jevons photo
Dick Cheney photo
Donald J. Trump photo
Colley Cibber photo

“Oh, how many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring!”

Colley Cibber (1671–1757) British poet laureate

The Double Gallant, Act I, sc. ii (1707).

L. Frank Baum photo
Nicholas Wade photo