Mere Quotes - Page 17

• Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.

  Lytton Strachey

  Independent, Past, Important

  16 Copy quote

• No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.

  Glenn Greenwald

  Country, Believe, Government

  Glenn Greenwald (2014). “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State”, p.10, Penguin UK

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• My other bodily ailments have become mere matters of history.

  William Banting

  Matter, Ailments

  William Banting (2005). “Letter on Corpulence”, p.50, Cosimo, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I could never put anything into a picture that wasn't actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie, a mere bit of artfulness.

  Lucian Freud

  Lying, Would Be, Bits

  Lucian Freud, Rolf Lauter, Jean Christophe Ammann, Craig Hartley, Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) (2001). “Lucian Freud: naked portraits : Werke der 40er bis 90er Jahre”, Hatje Cantz Publishers

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner

  Wealth, Flash, Ifs

  6 Copy quote

• Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

  William T. Vollmann

  Religious, Angel, Letters

  William T Vollmann (2005). “Europe Central”, p.36, Penguin

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

  P. D. James

  Eye, Mass Extinction, Light

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.24, Vintage

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.'

  C. S. Lewis

  Kings, Mean, Men

  C. S. LEWIS (1947). “THE ABOLITION OF MAN”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators.

  Dave Barry

  Children, Political, Training

  Dave Barry (1984). “Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have Around the Home”, p.75, Rodale

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Past, Errors, Ideas

  Henry Hazlitt (2010). “Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics”, p.6, Crown Business

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Real, Looks, Wages

  Henry Hazlitt (2010). “Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics”, p.23, Crown Business

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

  Gene Wolfe

  Sex, Mean, Fiction

  4 Copy quote

• The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.

  Emile Durkheim

  Passion, Men, Meditation

  John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Emile Durkheim (2010). “Suicide”, p.279, Simon and Schuster

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The mere possibility provides no warrant for denying what I clearly grasp.

  William Lane Craig

  Possibility, Warrants

  26 Copy quote

• The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler

  Samuel Morse

  Character, Parent, Moral

  34 Copy quote

• We are whirling through endless space with an inconceivable speed, all around us everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere is energy. There mart be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then; with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expand our minds, strengthens our hopes and and fills our hearts with supreme delight.

  Nikola Tesla

  Moving, Heart, Light

  "The Nikola Tesla Treasury".

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most people define learning too narrowly as mere 'problem-solving', so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. The need to reflect critically on their own behaviour, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organisation’s problems, and then change how they act.

  Chris Argyris

  Errors, People, Focus

  "Teaching Smart People How to Learn". hbr.org. June 1991.

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.

  James MacGregor Burns

  Leadership, Technique, Ethics

  James MacGregor Burns (1978). “Leadership”, Harpercollins

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• Friend, many and many a dream is mere confusion a cobweb of no consequence at all. Two gates for ghostly dreams there are: One gateway of honest horn, and one of ivory. Issuing by the ivory gate are dreams of glimmering illusion, fantasies, but those that come through solid polished horn may be borne out, if mortals only know them.

  Homer

  Dream, Two, Ivory

  Homer, Robert Fitzgerald (1963). “The Odyssey”, Anchor

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

  Thomas Huxley

  Mean, Men, Grandfather

  7 Copy quote

• For millions of Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Real, Trying

  10 Copy quote

• All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.

  Andrew Jackson

  Independent, Rights, Citizens

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  101 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mere human beings cant afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

  Storm Jameson

  Loyalty, Law, Space

  4 Copy quote

• By mere burial man arrives not at bliss; and in the future life, throughout its whole infinite range, they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here, who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  Men, Bliss, Infinite

  9 Copy quote

• Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Law, Feelings, Reason

  "Felix Frankfurter Reminisces". Book by Harlan Buddington Phillips, January 1, 1960.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source