Rabble Quotes - page 2
It had become an indisputable dogma that every expression in the same language must bear the same meaning in all peoples. And this was really the greatest affliction of the Select of that epoch, that they had to converse in the same tongue as the rabble, which had so often been desecrated in Parliaments, and assemblies, and lectures, and railway carriages; all of them, like Stendhal, would have given a great deal to have a langue sacre, comprehensible only by the few. All of them, like Goethe, allegorized meanings into their best works, in order to give the slip to prying snouts, and endeavoured to make themselves, as did Nietzsche, inaccessible, in order that "the swine might not break into the gardens.”.
Oscar Levy
Lord, for sixty-so years I've surrendered my love,
to emblems of kindness, and not the kindness they were emblems of,
Trammels and rings, with the strength of old strings,
and some hobble skirt spring, by the old problem caught,
Children, sometimes I think all our thoughts are just things,
and then sometimes think things are just thoughts"
and the rabble rang.
Aaron Weiss
If blasted hopes and ruin'd name,
And all the venom Love lends Shame -
The violent death, and rabble eye,
To look upon its agony;
If these are not enough to win
A pardon for Earth's deadliest sin,
Words will not, cannot! - never dare
Tell me it may be won by prayer!
The coward prayer, the coward tear,
Not from remorse wrung, but from fear!
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed. He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the 'pass has been sold' by Mr. C[hamberlain], Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.
Rab Butler
Neglected by Congress below; pinched with every want here; distressed with the small-pox; want of Generals and discipline in our Army - which may rather be called a great rabble - our late unhappy retreat from Quebec, and loss of the Cedars; our credit and reputation lost, and great part of the country; and a powerful foreign enemy advancing upon us; are so many difficulties we cannot surmount them.
Benedict Arnold
Our habit of constantly and zealously answering to any rabble has already done us a lot of harm and will do much more. ... We do not have to apologize for anything. We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest. As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them. ... We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody's examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to.
Ze'ev Jabotinsky
When the Greek lost the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.
Theodore Roosevelt
But a meek humble Man of modest Sense,
Who, Preaching Peace, does practice Continence;
Whose pious life's a proof he does believe,
Mysterious Truths, which no Man can conceive.
If upon Earth there dwell such God-like Men,
I'll here Recant my Paradox to them;
Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay,
And, with the rabble world, their Laws obey.
If such there are, yet grant me This at least,
Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast.
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
The sinners would have included those who did not pay their tithes (one tenth of their income) to the priests, and those who were negligent about the sabbath rest and about ritual cleanliness. The laws and customs on these matters were so complicated that the uneducated were quite incapable of understanding what was expected of them. Education in those days was a matter of knowing .. the law and all its ramifications. The illiterate and uneducated were inevitably lawless and immoral. The ‘am ha-arez, or uneducated peasants, ‘the rabble who know nothing of the law' (John 7:49) were regarded by even the most enlightened Pharisees, like Hillel, as incapable of virtue and piety.
Albert Nolan
A political lie is sometimes born out of a discarded statesman's head, and thence delivered to be nursed and dandled by the rabble. Sometimes it is produced a monster, and licked into shape: at other times it comes into the world completely formed, and is spoiled in the licking. It is often born an infant in the regular way, and requires time to mature it; and often it sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth; and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here it screams aloud at the opening of the womb; and there it is delivered with a whisper. I know a lie, that now disturbs half the kingdom with its noise, which, although too proud and great at present to own its parents, I can remember its whisperhood. To conclude the nativity of this monster; when it comes into the world without a sting, it is still-born; and whenever it loses its sting, it dies.
Jonathan Swift
The last public levy was 297 lbs. (of tobacco) per poll, and the great levy the year before has given occasion for malignant spirits to mutter, and may cause some to mutiny, "for the common people will never be brought to understand the just reason of a public charge, or will they ever believe that the expense is for their own preservation." Since General Davis and Pate were hanged the rabble have been much appalled. Now enjoy peace among themselves, though never body was more replete with malignancy and frenzy than our people were about August last, and they wanted but a monstrous head to their monstrous body. The greatest revolution has occurred in Virginia affairs, for as their rebellion was grounded upon madness and folly, so the wheel has turned again as wonderfully and swiftly in the submission of all the chief rebels...
Thomas Notley
I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time came? - till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow-man.
Henry David Thoreau
American farmers fought the ‘protective tariff' from 1800 to 1896 ... Even as late as 1933, when Garet Garrett and I drove all over the Midwest, the farmers in general were not wanting AAA or any other federal interference. In Kansas I met a rabble‐rousing New Dealer from Washington who took me to a farmers' meeting where he spoke with real conviction and eloquence. The audience listened absolutely noncommittal, until he worked up to an incandescent peroration: ‘We went down there to Washington and got you all a Ford. Now we're going to get you a Cadillac!' The temperature suddenly fell below freezing; the silent antagonism was colder than zero. That ended the speech; the whole audience rose and went out. The orator later said to me, ‘Those damned numbskulls! The only thing to use on them is a club!'
Rose Wilder Lane
The remarkable thing about Jesus was that, although he came from the middle class and had no appreciable disadvantages himself, he mixed socially with the lowest of the low and identified himself with them. He became an outcast by choice. Why did Jesus do this? What would make a middle-class man talk to beggars and mix socially with the poor? What would make a prophet associate with the rabble who know nothing of the law? The answer comes across very clearly in the gospels: compassion.
Albert Nolan
