Mass Quotes - Page 14

• In the 1930s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.

  James Meade

  War, Two, Evil

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• Being slim is the new elitism. Thinness today says that you are richer, smarter and more successful than the overweight masses.

  David Zinczenko

  Successful, Today, Slim

  "NOTICED; Men Who Step Up to the Scale and Crow" by David Colman, www.nytimes.com. September 8, 2002.

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• Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.

  Aberjhani

  Compassion, Empathy, Humanity

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• We seem to want mass production, but we must remember that men are individuals not to be satisfactorily dealt with in masses, and the making of men is more important than the production of things.

  Ralph Washington Sockman

  Men, Important, Want

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• The exploitation of women, mass hunger, disregard for freedom of conscience and for freedom of speech, widespread and racial discrimination all these evils are far too prevalent to be overlooked.

  Rene Cassin

  Racism, Evil, Freedom Of Speech

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• Forgotten rimes, and college themes, Worm-eaten plans, and embryo schemes; A mass of heterogeneous matter. A chaos dark, nor land nor water.

  Anna Letitia Barbauld

  Dark, College, Land

  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lucy Aikin (1825). “The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld: in two volumes”, p.57

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• O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Taken, Class, Luxury

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• Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame?

  Richard J. Foster

  Spiritual, Running, Distance

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• The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air access remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.

  Wendell Berry

  Military, Independent, Technology

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.16, Counterpoint

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• [...] There is none that disperses its control more complexly through the voting system, the work situation, the church, the family, the school, the mass media - none more successful in mollifying opposition with reforms, isolating people from one another, creating patriotic loyalty.

  Howard Zinn

  Loyalty, School, Patriotic

  Howard Zinn (2015). “A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present”, p.632, Routledge

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• Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president.

  Jack Balkin

  Bullying, Attitude, Men

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• Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.

  Stephen Bayley

  Fashion, Hype, Gathering

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• Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.

  Walt Whitman

  Art, Men, Thinking

  Walt Whitman, Floyd Stovall (2007). “Prose Works 1892: Speciman Days”, p.225, NYU Press

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• The most intense curiosity and excitement prevailed, and though the weather was uncertain, enormous masses of densely packed people lined the road, shouting and waving hats and handkerchiefs as we flew by them.

  Fanny Kemble

  Weather, People, Curiosity

  Fanny Kemble (1879). “Records of a Girlhood”

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• As light fades and the shadows deepen, all petty and exacting details vanish, everything trivial disappears, and I see things as they are in great strong masses: the buttons are lost, but the sitter remains; the sitter is lost, but the shadow remains; the shadow is lost, but the picture remains. And that, night cannot efface from the painter's imagination.

  James Whistler

  Strong, Night, Light

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• A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaningless of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring upon them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

  Eric Hoffer

  Self, Anxiety, Abuse

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

  Eric Hoffer

  People, Society, Technique

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• The vigor of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. When we ascribe the success of a movement to its faith, doctrine, propaganda, leadership, ruthlessness and so on, we are but referring to instruments of unification and to means used to inculcate a readiness for self-sacrifice. It is perhaps impossible to understand the nature of a mass movement unless it is recognized that their chief preoccupation is to foster, perfect and perpetuate a facility for united action and self-sacrifice.

  Eric Hoffer

  Mean, Sacrifice, Self

  Eric Hoffer (1980). “The True Believer”

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• No one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.

  Mark Twain

  Perception, Republican, Meetings

  Mark Twain (1992). “Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, Volume 1: 1852-1890”, p.1115, Library of America

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• I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

  Denise Levertov

  Book, Thinking, Effectiveness

  Denise Levertov (1981). “Light Up the Cave”, p.123, New Directions Publishing

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• The mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness; the superior man exults in his gloom.

  Garrison Keillor

  Happiness, Men, Shallow

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• Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Football, Responsibility, Bears

  "Nietzsche, Camus, Grass - the dream team" by Mark Perryman, www.theguardian.com. April 20, 2006.

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• We ought therefore to suspect that a great mass of information respecting the Bible, and the introduction of it into the world, has been suppressed by the united tyranny of Church and State, for the purpose of keeping people in ignorance, and which ought to be known.

  Thomas Paine

  Bible, Ignorance, People

  Thomas Paine (1830). “The Theological Works of Thomas Paine: To which are Added the Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar”, p.364

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• God may be a matter of indifference to the evolutionists, and a life beyond may have no charm for them, but the mass of mankind will continue to worship their creator and continue to find comfort in the promise of their Savior that he has gone to prepare a place for them.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Promise, Matter, Comfort

  William Jennings Bryan (1924). “William Jennings Bryan on Orthodoxy, Modernism, and Evolution”, Facsimiles-Garl

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• Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.

  David Ogilvy

  Writing, College, Advertising

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