Quotes on Men

Be an example to your men, in your duty and in private life. Never spare yourself, and let the troops see that you don't in your endurance of fatigue and privation. Always be tactful and well-mannered and teach your subordinates to do the same. Avoid excessive sharpness or harshness of voice, which usually indicates the man who has shortcomings of his own to hide.

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere." "To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

But whate'er I am, nor I nor any man that but man is, With nothing shall be pleased 'til he be eased With being nothing.

Every man is like the company he wont to keep.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Just as doubt, despair, and desensitization go together, so do faith, hope, and charity. The latter, however, must be carefully and constantly nurtured, whereas despair, like dandelions, needs so little encouragement to sprout and spread. Despair comes so naturally to the natural man!

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.

You are young, and in love. Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

No one can ride on the back of a man unless it is bent.

Go moan for man. It's the pathos of people that gets us down, all the lovers in this dream.

Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan.

What I’ve loved most after you, is myself: that is, my dignity and that strength which made me superior to other men. That Strength was my life. You’ve broken it with a word, so I must die.

All men are liars, said Roberta Muldoon, who knew this was true because she had once been a man.

A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.

Dear me, if men and women would only trust, understand, and help one another as my children do, what a capital place the world would be!

Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies." (Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)