Quotes About People

For a certain kind of temperament, defeat is never defeat by reality, but always defeat by other people, often acting together as members of a class, tribe, conspiracy or clan.

society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To

Two accusations against our political inheritance have lodged in the brains that I have examined in this book: first, that 'capitalist' society is founded on power and domination; second, that 'capitalism' means 'commodification', the reduction of people to things, and the fetishizing of things as agents.

The whole point of the concept of culture is to mark out the significant differences between the forms of human life, and the satisfactions that people take in them.

Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people's stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.

To select only monuments supresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable, therefore senseless. What is to be seen is thus constantly in the process of vanishing, and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness.

With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence.

Early disappointments with people left Washington with a residual cynicism that was to jibe well with Hamilton's views.

This fierce defender of private property—this man for whom contracts were to be sacred covenants—expressly denied the sanctity of any agreement that stripped people of their freedom.

The president of a democracy, he averred, had to show himself to the people, and some danger was an inescapable hazard of office. "To be absolutely safe," he told John Nicolay resignedly, "I should lock myself up in a box.

For Washington, parties weren't so much expressions of popular politics as their negation, denying the true will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives.

factions can become "potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

While Grant was celebrated as a victorious wartime general and the president who had peacefully settled the Alabama claims, most gratifying to him was being honored as the protector of freed people. A delegation of painters marched by, hoisting a picture that depicted the shackles of slavery being struck off beside the words "Welcome to the Liberator.

In number 71, Hamilton presented his theory of presidents as leaders who should act for the popular good, even if the people were sometimes deluded about their interests.

The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people," he told Morris. "In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expedient, fickleness, and folly.

Frederick Douglass, who had entertained hopes for the Haitian post, graciously conceded defeat. "Your appointment," he told Bassett, "is a grand achievement for yourself and for our whole people.

But he was so inundated with pleas that many more people were spurned than saved, generating unavoidable bitterness.

However, he was persistent, which pleased or displeased people according to taste.

Where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. "As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.

Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle.

William was a natural salesman who easily charmed people.

sometimes people use complete honesty as an excuse for sadism.

when good people do good, and evil people do evil, it is not surprising. But when good people do evil, it takes religion to do that.

Never have a felt so keenly the danger of new religious movements and the damage that is done to people who are lured into such groups, not out of weakness in character but through their desire to do good and live meaningful lives.