Merely Quotes

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

The atom bomb was no "great decision." It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism, it is essential.

Most of the things we decide are not what we know to be the best. We say yes, merely because we are driven into a corner and must say something.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them.

In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

In 1833, protection was abandoned, and a tariff was established by which it was provided that we should, in a few years, have a system of merely revenue duties.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

The universal human laws - need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

Committing genocide on behalf of an institution generates greater loyalty to it than merely getting people fired from their jobs on its behalf.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

Gossip isn't scandal and it's not merely malicious. It's chatter about the human race by lovers of the same.

The Public is merely a multiplied "me."

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

It is time for the government of China to stop holding innocent religious figures in captivity merely for peacefully protesting China's occupation of Tibet.

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

The architect, Peter Arens who is the monstrous carbuncle architect, not merely did his design which had won a public competition never get built but his practice suffered financially for some years.