Quotes on Men

Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love.

In speaking to you men of the greatest city of the West, men of the state which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.

Every man is valued in this world as he shows by his conduct that he wishes to be valued.

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.

Man [is] a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.

During their lifetimes, every man and woman will stumble across a great opportunity. Sadly, most of them will simply pick themselves up, dust themselves down and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

Love of glory, fear of shame, greed for fortune, the desire to make life agreeable and comfortable, and the wish to depreciate others - all of these are often the causes of the bravery that is spoken so highly of by men.

To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'

It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. . . . Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.

I am always for the man who wishes to work.

Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.

This life in us; however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened; To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish; Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.

Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.

The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.