Man

"Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman. The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer."

"His tribe were God Almighty's gentlemen."

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

"At all times man approached his surroundings with wide open senses and a fertile intelligence, at all times he made incredible discoveries, at all times we can learn from his ideas."

"A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."

"Lords of humankind."

"We are coming we, the young men, Strong of heart and millions strong; We shall work where you have trifled, Cleanse the temple, right the wrong, Till the land our fathers visioned Shall be spread before our ken, We are through with politicians; Give us Men! Give us Men!"

"Man is a make believe animal—he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part."

"What tho' the spicy breezes Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile?"

"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

"Men may rule the world, but women rule the men who rule the world."

"It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step."

"Where soil is, men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers."

"Man has come by his great gifts not by any effort of his own, but... has fallen heir to a fortune for which he has never laboured."

"Racial and national contentions are not restricted to any particular people or land; we find them in every country.The politician is too near to these... to see them in their proper light; even the historian is not far enough away from them to see them in their right perspective. ...For the anthropologist there are only two well-marked phases in human history. The first phase is that of Natural subsistence—an infinitely long and monotonous chapter, stretching over a million of years or more. The second is the phase of Artificial subsistence—a short chapter covering a period of 10,000 or 12,000 years at the utmost... In the first or long phase mankind was broken into small and scattered groups which gained as best they could a sparse, uncertain, and coarse sustenance from the natural produce of shore and stream, moorland and woodland. In the second or short phase man conquered nature; by means of cultivation and domestication he forced from the soil a sure and abundant supply of food, thus rendering possible the existence of our modern massed populations. ...In that immense first phase of our history an elaborate mental machinery had been evolved for binding small groups of mankind into social units. ...The mental adaptations which modern man has inherited from the immensity of his past we may briefly describe as part of Nature's tribal machinery. ...in our modern racial strifes and national agitations we see man's inherited tribal instincts at war with his present-day conditions of life. We have broken up, or are attempting to break up, Nature's ancient tribal machinery and at the present time are striving to replace her designs by others evolved in the minds of modern statesmen and politicians. ...We cannot understand the nature of our modern racial and national problems until we perceive that in these days we are endeavouring to build a new world out of the wreckage of an old."

"There is a great deal of human nature in man."

"No one has any right to be angry with me, if I think fit to enumerate man among the quadrapeds. Man is neither a stone nor a plant, but an animal, for such is his way of living and moving; nor is he a worm, for then he would have only one foot; nor an insect, for then he would have antennae; nor a fish, for he has no fins; nor a bird, for he has no wings. Therefore, he is a quadraped, had a mouth like that of other quadrapeds, and finally four feet, on two of which he goes, and uses the other two for prehensive purposes."

"As a natural historian according to the principles of science, up to the present time I have been not been able to discover any character by which man can be distinguished from the ape; for there are somewhere apes which are less hairy than man, erect in position, going just like him on two feet, and recalling the human species by the use they make of their hands and feet, to such an extent, that the less educated travellers have given them out as a kind of man."

"I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character—one that is according to generally accepted principles of classification, by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. ...But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so."

"A man of mark."

"No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men."

"In a museum in London there is an exhibit called "The Value of Man": a long coffinlike box with lots of compartments where they've put starch—phosphorus—flour—bottles of water and alcohol—and big pieces of gelatin. I am a man like that."

"We all are blind until we see That in the human plan Nothing is worth the making if It does not make the man. Why build these cities glorious If man unbuilded goes? In vain we build the world, unless The builder also grows."