Multitudes Quotes - Page 22

• Those who have past much of their lives in this great city, look upon its opulence and its multitudes, its extent and variety, with cold indifference; but an inhabitant of the remoter parts of the kingdom is immediately distinguished by a kind of dissipated curiosity, a busy endeavour to divide his attention amongst a thousand objects, and a wild confusion of astonishment and alarm.

  Samuel Johnson

  Past, Cities, Confusion

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy, Francis Pearson Walesby (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Adventurer and Idler”, p.41

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• Without absolutes revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers.

  John Owen

  Self, Sea, Ideas

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• I developed a term that is used in the game right now called sacking a quarterback. Sacking a quarterback is just like you devastate a city or you cream a multitude of people. I mean it’s just like you put all the offensive players in one bag and I just take a baseball bat and beat on the bag.

  Deacon Jones

  Baseball, Mean, Player

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• There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.

  Plato

  Belief, Applause, Statesmen

  Plato (1977). “The Portable Plato”, p.256, Penguin

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• Vast multitudes of professing Christians fit into the category spoken of here. They call Jesus 'Lord,' but they practice lawlessness. They profess faith in Jesus, but have no regard for the divine law.

  Ray Comfort

  Christian, Jesus, Law

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• If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Photography, Art, Real

  1859 'Salon of 1859', section 2, in Curiosites Esthetiques (1868).

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• Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.

  Victor Hugo

  Rope, Les Miserable, Made

  Victor Hugo (1994). “Les Miserables Volume One”, p.323, Wordsworth Editions

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• Whoso taketh in hand to govern a multitude, either by way of liberty or principality, and cannot assure himself of those persons that are enemies to that enterprise, doth frame a state of short perseverance.

  Walter Raleigh

  Perseverance, Hands, Enemy

  Sir Walter Raleigh, William Oldys, Thomas Birch (1829). “Miscellaneous works”, p.97

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• We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.

  Euell Gibbons

  Spiritual, People, Able

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• Just as Americans have discovered the hidden energy costs in a multitude of products-in refrigerating a steak, for example, on its way to the butcher-they are about to discover the hidden water costs. Beginning with the water that irrigated the corn that was fed to the steer, the steak may have accounted for 3,500 gallons. The water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer. It takes 14,935 gallons of water to grow a bushel of wheat, 60,000 gallons to produce a ton of steel, 120 gallons to put a single egg on the breakfast table.

  Jerry Adler

  Science, Eggs, Water

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• Though He did what he could to help the multitudes, He had to devote Himself primarily to a few men, rather than the masses, so that the masses could at last be saved. This was the genius of his strategy.

  Robert Emerson Coleman

  Christian, Men, Genius

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• The multitude . . . have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them. . . . It is not safe to trust to the virtue of any people.

  Alexander Hamilton

  People, Safe, Virtue

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• What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?

  Christiaan Huygens

  Stars, Distance, Animal

  "Cosmotheoros". Book by Christiaan Huygens, Book 2, pp. 150-151, as quoted in the English translation "The Celestial Worlds Discover'd" (1722), 1695.

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• True disciples of Jesus Christ have always been concerned for the one. Jesus Christ is our greatest example. He was surrounded by multitudes and spoke to thousands, yet He always had concern for the one.

  Joseph B. Wirthlin

  Jesus, Example, Christ

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• As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbour multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behaviour.

  Damian Thompson

  Brain, Battle, Different

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• A multitude of words is tiresome, unlike remaining centered.

  Laozi

  Taoism, Tiresome

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• I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Writing, Names, Errors

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• I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Years, Ideas, People

  "The Creative Personality". www.psychologytoday.com. July 1, 1996.

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• Consider the cost when Christians ignore Jesus commands to sell their possessions and give to the poor and instead choose to spend their resources on better comforts, larger homes, nicer cars, and more stuff.  Consider the cost when these Christians gather in churches and choose to spend millions of dollars on nice buildings to drive up to, cushioned chairs to sit in, and endless programs to enjoy for themselves.  Consider the cost for the starving multitudes who sit outside the gate of contemporary Christian affluence.

  David Platt

  Christian, Jesus, Nice

  David Platt (2010). “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream”, p.20, Multnomah

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• Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

  Harriet Martineau

  Inspirational, Weakness, Argument

  Harriet Martineau (1836). “Philosophical essays. Essays on the art of thinking. Sabbath musings. Moral essays. Parables. Poetry”, p.63

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• Public sentiment is not observed. The wealthy and powerful gain a ready hearing, but the plodding, suffering, unorganized complaining multitude are spurned and derided.

  James B. Weaver

  Powerful, Political, Suffering

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• GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mean, Generosity, Noble

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.94, University of Georgia Press

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• You can't travel the back roads very long without discovering a multitude of gentle people doing good for others with no expectation of gain or recognition. The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines. Some people out there spend their whole lives selflessly.

  Charles Kuralt

  Kindness, Long, People

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• The liberty of the press is a blessing when we are inclined to write against others, and a calamity when we find ourselves overborne by the multitude of our assailants.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Blessing, Liberty

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1857). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.191

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• You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it - low, vulgar, meddling with everything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion - and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Passion, Land, House

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