Merely Quotes

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years, anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

I will never work merely to make a reputation for myself, to be popular for appearances rather than for what I am. My task is to lead my country through service.

No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests and otherwise function as separate individuals.

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into old concepts.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

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.

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind.

All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control.

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.

In those days I was new to covers; merely felt pleased that a story of mine had been honored. I later met Rogers who did some of my early covers and I was impressed with him.