Merit Quotes - Page 30

• Now these fellows in Washington wouldn't be so serious and particular if they only had to vote on what they thought was good for the majority of the people in the U.S. That would be a cinch. But what makes it hard for them is every time a bill comes up they have things to decide that have nothing to do with the merit of the bill. The principal thing is of course: What will this do for me personally back home?

  Will Rogers

  Home, People, Majority

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• Our aim is to appeal to reason. … Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.

  Carter G. Woodson

  Prayer, Wish, Praying

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• The Spider as an Artist Has never been employed- Though his surpassing Merit Is freely certified.

  Emily Dickinson

  Artist, Spiders, Insects

  Emily Dickinson, Helen Vendler (2010). “Dickinson”, p.418, Harvard University Press

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• I think that being liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, noncomitted to a cause but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it's a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they're not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen.

  Walter Cronkite

  Thinking, Political, Causes

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• To live by grace is to live solely by the merit of Jesus Christ. To live by grace is to base my entire relationship with God, including my acceptance and standing with Him, on my union with Christ.

  Jerry Bridges

  Jesus, Acceptance, Grace

  Jerry Bridges (2014). “Transforming Grace: Living Confidently in God’s Unfailing Love”, p.59, Tyndale House

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• It’s not our job to assess the merit of our vision or judge its importance. It is our job to receive the vision and act upon it.

  Debbie Ford

  Jobs, Judging, Vision

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• I don't think the world works on merit.

  Charles de Lint

  Thinking, World

  Charles de Lint (2002). “The Onion Girl”, p.26, Macmillan

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• A lofty birth or a large fortune portend merit, and cause it to be the sooner noticed.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Causes, Birth, Fortune

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• The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity - the political allocation of wealth and opportunity - is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

  George Will

  Opportunity, Justice, Political

  "Tincture of Lawlessness". www.realclearpolitics.com. May 14, 2009.

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• Criticism discloses that which it would fain conceal, but conceals that which it professes to disclose; it is therefore, read by the discerning, not to discover the merits of an author, but the motives of his critic.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Criticism, Motive, Critics

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.230

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• Power. like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer; it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation. To acquire it, appears not more difficult than to be dispossessed of it when acquired, since it enables the holder to shift his own errors on dependents, and to take their merits to himself. But the miracle of losing it vanishes, when we reflect that we are as liable to fall as to rise, by the treachery of others; and that to say "I am" is language that has been appropriated exclusively to God!

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fall, Errors, Giving

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.23

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• But there is merit even in the mentally retarded legislator. He asks the questions that everyone is afraid to ask for fear of seeming simple.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Simple, Retarded, Legislators

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter 12, p. 328, 1977.

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• Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition.

  William Hazlitt

  Women, Vanity, Coquette

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• I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Block, Fall, Class

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• The Democratic leadership has expressed great concern for the incarceration rate in the commonwealth in the last few years. Now they want to fill the prisons up with people who would violate the merit law, a law that's been proven to be ambiguous at best and impossible to understand at worst.

  Bill Vaughan

  Years, Law, People

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• Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men!... The economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.

  Emma Goldman

  Sex, Men, Degrees

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism: Top Crime Collections”, p.100, 谷月社

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• Photography has every right and every merit to claim our attention as the art of our age.

  Alexander Rodchenko

  Photography, Art, Age

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• Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

  Alan Kay

  Beautiful, Purpose, Done

  ACM Queue, Volume 2, issue 9, queue.acm.org. December 27, 2004.

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• Great Modesty often hides great Merit.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Modesty, Poor Richard

  Benjamin Franklin (2012). “Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack”, p.53, Courier Corporation

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• Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Guessing, Doe, Reason

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• The great merit of Stephen Gould's account of the disastrous history of phychometrics is that he shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Argument, Biology, Environmentalist

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• Hang your merit. I don't seek anyone's approbation.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Approval

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “The Possessed: Dostoevsky's Collections”, p.263, 谷月社

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• Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel the most in the common and vulgar professions.

  David Hume

  Mediocrity, Literature, Occupation

  David Hume (1782). “The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688”, p.197

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• Man's shortcomings and sins are all due to the substance of the body and not to its form; while all his merits are exclusively due to his form.

  Maimonides

  Men, Substance, Body

  Moses Maimonides (2016). “Guide for the perplexed”, p.1009, Moses Maimonides

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• There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.

  Eugene Delacroix

  Pride, Men, Thinking

  "The Journal of Eugene Delacroix: A Selection". Book edited by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, Cornell University Press, June 6, 1824 (p. 45), 1980.

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