Mere Quotes - page 7

The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight; that he shall not be a mere passenger, but shall do his share in the work that each generation of us finds ready to hand; and, furthermore, that in doing his work he shall show, not only the capacity for sturdy self-help, but also self-respecting regard for the rights of others. (Theodore Roosevelt)
If we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain over national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life, then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay. View quote
Theodore Roosevelt
The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a comtempt for mere external show. View quote
James A. Garfield
The whole business is the crudest sort of stratagem, since we have no way of foreseeing it to the end. It is a mere paying out of rope on the chance that somewhere along the length of it will be a noose. View quote
Isaac Asimov
Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves - and be free. View quote
Cesar Chavez
A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. View quote
Arthur Conan Doyle
I have always been amazed at my contemporaries' lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself. View quote
Samuel Beckett
Aristotle... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless. View quote
Francis Bacon
Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, And with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain. View quote
Jonathan Swift
Love is the ark appointed for the righteous, Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition. View quote
Rumi
Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy.. a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. (H. L. Mencken)
All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure. View quote
Lydia Maria Child
I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself. View quote
Thomas Bernhard
Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man? View quote
Czesław Miłosz
It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it. View quote
John Pilger
Impurity is a mere superimposition under which your real nature has become hidden. But the real you is already perfect, already strong. View quote
Swami Vivekananda
In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The word "art” does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank. View quote
Martin Heidegger
The dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art. It is mere merchandise. View quote
Isadora Duncan
Life is not a thing of knowing only--nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions. View quote
Learned Hand
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood. (Herman Melville)
A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body. View quote
John Stuart Mill
A new danger now beset him [Grotius], the danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for this or that client: a mere legal beast of prey. Fortunately for himself and for the world he took a higher view of his life-work: his determination clearly was to make himself a thoroughly equipped jurist, and then, as he rose more and more in his profession, to use his powers for the good of his country and of mankind. View quote
Andrew Dickson White
The mere state of being without funds is a neutral fact - constitutionally an irrelevance, like race, creed, or color. View quote
Robert H. Jackson
Thus we seem to be on the verge of an expansion of welfare economics into something like a social science of ethics and politics: what was intended to be a mere porch to ethics is either the whole house or nothing at all. In so laying down its life welfare economics may be able to contribute some of its insights and analytical methods to a much broader evaluative analysis of the whole social process. View quote
Kenneth Boulding