We’ve collected the best Merely Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Henry Miller, Robert Lighthizer, Herman Melville, Albert Einstein, H. P. Lovecraft. Use them as an inspiration.
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Conservative statesmen from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan sometimes supported protectionism, and at other times, they leaned toward lowering barriers. But they always understood that trade policy was merely a tool for building a strong and independent country with a prosperous middle class.
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The feeble soul merely whines and complains.
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Being ‘at the mercy of legislative majorities’ is merely another way of describing the basic American plan: representative democracy.
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We are sliding back into a dark era, and there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.
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Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.
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Industrialisation is necessary. But acquisition is by no means the only avenue through which it can be achieved. The Cochin Airport is a prime example of this. Instead of choosing to acquire the land, the State asked the private parties to negotiate with the landowners directly. The State merely acted as an arbitrator.
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We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.
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Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
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Hence, even in the domain of natural science the aid of the experimental method becomes indispensable whenever the problem set is the analysis of transient and impermanent phenomena, and not merely the observation of persistent and relatively constant objects.
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The Real is ever-present, like the screen on which the cinematographic pictures move. While the picture appears on it, the screen remains invisible. Stop the picture, and the screen will become clear. All thoughts and events are merely pictures moving on the screen of Pure Consciousness, which alone is real.
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We believe that what we possess we don’t ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don’t give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.
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For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.
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There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
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I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: ‘Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.
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A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail… Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.
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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.
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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.
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Men like me, who merely wish to establish political freedom, will in such circumstances lose all their influence, and others will get influence who may become dangerous to all established interests whatsoever.
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Some people think they are concentrating when they’re merely worrying.
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Aikido is not merely about fighting and the development of the physical self but the perfection of the spiritual man at the same time. It has very harmonious movements, very beautiful to watch and beautiful for your body to feel.
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I want to help all those youngsters in Nagpur who have fire and sporting spirit burning inside them and not merely those who want to take up wrestling.
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So somebody told me that if I wasn’t a coffee drinker yet, by the end of college I’d have to be, because a math major is so tough I would have to stay up very late. I was going to need coffee to do that. Well, merely because they said that, I never drank coffee in college, never got addicted to it, never needed it.
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Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.
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People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer‘s creation.
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Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale.
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I am not asking for a pardon of my conviction. I understand that the various collateral consequences of the court-martial conviction will stay on my record forever. I am merely asking for a first chance to live my life outside the U.S.D.B. as the person I was born to be.
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Conservatism is not about the party, because the party is merely the shell. It is the inside – it’s the filling that really means something.
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I do think that the days of gathering around a television set that functions merely as a television set, to receive a live broadcast of some networked programming, those days are probably numbered.
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For children, diversity needs to be real and not merely relegated to learning the names of the usual suspects during Black History Month or enjoying south-of-the-border cuisine on Cinco de Mayo. It means talking to and spending time with kids not like them so that they may discover those kids are in fact just like them.
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Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It’s the holy grail of business, but achieving it – even merely explaining it – is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.
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Many critics of the Palestinians, especially those in Congress, think the current calm is merely the eye of the storm. That’s why the House of Representatives approved a foreign aid package last week that forbade the direct financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority .
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I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.
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I believe that our society is merely a reflection of what is going on inside each and every one of us.
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All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.
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Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.
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Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.
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I believe we should reframe our response to climate change as an imperative for growth rather than merely being a way of being green or meeting environmental commitments.
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Inner city education must change. Our responsibility is not merely to provide access to knowledge; we must produce educated people.
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My political giving has merely followed my relationships.
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The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
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I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
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For employers, mobility no longer means merely traditional expatriate placements, but moving jobs to where talented people are located.
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To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.
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What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos.
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We inculcate young people with the message that if they don’t succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color.
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What appeals to me about an American music directorship is the involvement of the conductor with the orchestra and the community. I think that’s a fantastic thing. In Europe, being principal conductor means merely that you’re the person who does most of the concerts. For me, that simply isn’t enough.
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We do not merely perceive objects and hold thoughts in our minds: all our perceptions and thought processes are felt. All have a distinctive component that announces an unequivocal link between images and the existence of life in our organism.
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It is not enough for us to merely continue to talk about and contribute to the echo chamber of white noise of what’s wrong with America or for candidates to spout off silly poll-tested talking points about national security or foreign policy.
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The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments’ plans.
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Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.
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Comedy films never die, all they need is a good script instead of merely relying on humour. That said, I would love to portray more characters like the one I play in ‘Perariyathavar.’
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When you start to work with someone, there’s a negotiation that takes place involving what’s going to happen when you have a difference of opinion. Most attempts at collaboration never survive the negotiation. Merely being agreeable is not enough.
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Broadband connections allow us to access more robust types of content, services, and applications – video chat versus email, or live streaming versus chat, for example. Yet if we look beyond our own personal use, we can see that broadband Internet access is not merely a convenience: it is a powerful force for social change.
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I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.
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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.
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If we took information only from sources with which we agreed on all issues, we would be left with merely quoting ourselves, and we would miss a great deal of truth.
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Ministers of God’s choosing are engaged in a great work. They are warring not merely against men, but Satan and his angels.
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Not a tenth of us who are in business are doing as well as we could if we merely followed the principles that were known to our grandfathers.
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The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does.
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We are approaching a new age of synthesis. Knowledge cannot be merely a degree or a skill… it demands a broader vision, capabilities in critical thinking and logical deduction without which we cannot have constructive progress.
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It’s not merely that conservatives are better at selling their product, or that they happen to have an easier-and undoubtedly simpler-ideological product to sell. It’s that they know what they are selling. Liberals in general and Obama in particular cannot say the same.
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Gone must be the days of only pointing fingers at others to fix what they may never fix. Our nation’s ills are not merely the result of corruption or racism, although these are evil. Our troubles can also be traced directly to ineffective Christians.
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Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.
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A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
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We must make it clear that revolution does not merely mean an upheaval or a sanguinary strife. Revolution necessarily implies the programme of systematic reconstruction of society on new and better adapted basis after complete destruction of the existing state of affairs (i.e., regime).
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Anyone who works is a fool. I don’t work – I merely inflict myself upon the public.
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Look at another person while living; the soul is not visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely because after death the soul is not visible is no demonstration that it does not still live.
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Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.
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‘The General Theory’ was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
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Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
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I am not making spiteful assertions now but merely stating the facts-that, for instance, among Hungarian generals there is such a considerable percentage of men of German origin, who of course had, in most cases, to alter their names if they wanted to get anywhere.
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The Constitution has never treated religion as merely another private opinion that government can order people to keep to themselves.
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
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The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.
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For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
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I always thought the point of life was something richer than that. Something full of great tragedy or comedy, reversal of fortune, ecstasy, that kind of thing. But no, contemporary urban theorists seem satisfied with the merely livable, which always sounds to me like the merely survivable, the not so bad.
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I don’t think you need to dumb down to a child, you merely have to be clear, you know?
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The conquest of space is not merely a technological project of interest to a handful of select scientists and specialists, valuable though that research and information may be.
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My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
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God doesn’t want us to merely sit around dreaming about things we can do and be. That’s a good place to start, but a poor place to stop. God wants us to turn our dreams into action.
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A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.
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The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That’s why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we’ve merely redesigned it.
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The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
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It may be that the seemingly intrinsic attraction that past time has for me is merely a desire for escapism, as I look out at the nation and world with little optimism.
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Many people lose their tempers merely from seeing you keep yours.
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Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men.
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What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
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The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.
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Europe is merely powerful; India is beautiful.
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What a different world this would be if people would listen to those who know more and not merely try to get something from those who have more.
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The labour movement had the best opportunity in 50 years to transform not merely an industrial situation and win an important battle for workers in struggle, but an opportunity to change the government of the day.
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It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.
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We are not brain surgeons. We are not curing cancer. We are not finding the next cure for Alzheimer‘s. We are simply and merely entertainment. We take on and wear the masks of characters. That’s what we’re paid to do.
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Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.
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Colleges do not merely offer preparation for the future; they occupy four years of a student‘s life, and an institution should do what it can to make these years absorbing and enjoyable.
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If tolerance is the best we can do in this moment, then by all means let’s be tolerant. But by stopping there, by merely tolerating each other, we miss so much.
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At the State Department, where I oversaw our human rights diplomacy, I often confronted dictatorships like China about their censorship of the Internet, which they justified by claiming they were merely filtering out lies. Our government cannot and should not take that path.
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That human beings seek their own well-being and that of those close to them is not an especially provocative discovery. What is important is that this universal aspect of human nature persists no matter what economic system is in place; it merely expresses itself in different forms.
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Many think of the sciences as merely a fund of knowledge. Journalists never ask scientists anything other than what the applications are of scientific breakthroughs. Interestingly, I doubt they ever ask a musician, writer, or actor the same question. I wonder why.
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I shall endeavour still further to prosecute this inquiry, an inquiry I trust not merely speculative, but of sufficient moment to inspire the pleasing hope of its becoming essentially beneficial to mankind.
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Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.
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You can mark in desire the rising of the tide, as the appetite more and more invades the personality, appealing, as it does, not merely to the sensory side of the self, but to its ideal components as well.
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I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.
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Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense.
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Ambition never is in a greater hurry than I; it merely keeps pace with circumstances and with my general way of thinking.
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America has chosen Georgia as a junior partner. The United States believes that Saakashvili is creating a democratic Georgia, but these are merely facades.
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Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.
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Americans should expect far more from a president than merely that he not be provably a criminal. They should expect a president to comport himself in accordance with the high duties of his office.
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Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
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Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.
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America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.
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We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +’s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +’s.
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We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
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Prosecutors use the conspiracy doctrine to punish two or more people who merely agree to commit a criminal act. They don’t even have to actually perform the act; they just need to have agreed to do so.
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The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages.
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People credit me for making the universe interesting when in fact the universe is inherently interesting, and I’m merely revealing that fact. I don’t think I’m anything special for this to happen.
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Above and beyond drawing my creations, I try to incorporate some kind of message. I try not to end as merely a question but try to provide a conclusion within the work.
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One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.
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Go where your customers take you! For example, did you know that Sony‘s first product was a rice cooker? Since abandoning the rice cooker, it has merely managed to become the world’s biggest consumer electronics company.
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I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant – it no longer existed.
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No state is free from militarism, which is inherent in the very concept of the sovereign state. There are merely differences of degree in the militarism of states.
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An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
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For my part, I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out one’s acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage. One merely comes to meet one’s friends, and show that one’s alive.
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A melody is not merely something you can hum.
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Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation.
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We don’t really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.
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Men and women wonder if merely walking or driving justifies being followed, stopped, or questioned. This practice and the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color must come to an end.
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Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
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I’m constantly saying, ‘I read a fascinating article in ‘The New Yorker‘… ‘ I say it so often that sometimes I think I have nothing interesting to say myself, I merely regurgitate ‘The New Yorker.’
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I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.
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Merely by existing and evolving in time – by existing – any physical system registers information, and by evolving in time it transforms or processes that information.
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A pro at Bayern doesn’t merely have to play football; he has a range of other appointments on behalf of the club. It all drains your energy.
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I’m sometimes scared of everything that has happened to us. We didn’t think Desilu Productions would grow so big. We merely wanted to be together and have two children.
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Thankfulness is the beginning of gratitude. Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.
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Snohetta promotes a more democratic workplace atmosphere than most other architectural offices. This may merely reflect prevalent employment practices in Scandinavia, but Snohetta places a stronger emphasis on group participation in the design process than typical high-style firms.
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The Communist regime didn’t consider this to be a shining moment in history and assigned no heroism to it. They classified it as merely an accident.
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There are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.
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Try to forget what objects you have before you – a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.
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In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.
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My advice to anyone experiencing racial or cultural bullying, either in real life or online, is to remember that these cowardly acts of unprovoked nastiness merely display the bully’s own insecurities, as what they point out as weaknesses are simply ways in which you differ from them.
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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one’s mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
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Drones don’t stop people from coming across the border, they merely tell you that someone is coming across the border.
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Congress has the responsibility to ensure that any international trade agreement entered into by the United States must serve the national interest, not merely the interests of those crafting the proposal in secret.
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Throughout his long career, Washington earned the adulation not merely of ordinary people but of the other luminaries whom we now hail as ‘founding fathers.’
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Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
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Literature is one of those realms in which giving out prizes can seem not merely dubious but positively obtuse.
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War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.
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Change doesn’t always mean progress, but the status quo isn’t always the best result either. It is merely the most convenient.
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To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.
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There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring‘ and ‘sensitive‘ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.
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Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen.
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Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
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Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
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Under communism, individuals are merely a means to be used toward the achievement of the ends of the collective nation-state. Thus, individuals can be easily sacrificed for the nation-state’s goals.
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We need to reaffirm that politics is not merely compatible with economic progress and development in the 21st century, but essential to it.
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And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying all we did not know.
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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.
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Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.
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For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.
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Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.
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Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.
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You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
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A lot of ancient poetry sees in nature a reflection of human emotions, and in a post-industrialized era, once people have become more aware of the necessity of a more harmonious relation between man and nature, we need to build cities which can connect with human spiritual needs instead of being merely functional.
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I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
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When my elders mentioned ‘The War,’ they invariably meant that of 1914-1918, even after 1939, for the Second World War was merely the continuation of the first, ‘an armistice of 20 years,’ as Marshal Foch had accurately predicted at the Versailles Peace Conference, with some changes of side.
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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.
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Haven‘t we put off problems without clarifying Japan’s will to protect the lives and assets of its people and territory with its own hands, and merely accepted the benefits of economic prosperity?
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I’m not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.
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I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.
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There are many types of preventive health care services that are covered, things like blood pressure medication, for example. And women are merely asking that their health be taken just as seriously.
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When I say I don’t get involved in politics, I merely mean that I don’t talk to reporters about it.
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I submit, on the other hand, most respectfully, that the Constitution not merely does not affirm that principle, but, on the contrary, altogether excludes it.
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The role of the intelligence – that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
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The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.
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What a man calls his ‘conscience‘ is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.
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I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary.
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The march to our duty here, not merely to ourselves, but to our surroundings, must proceed. God wills it.
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Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
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Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being. Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
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God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.
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Taking responsible steps to reduce poverty is not merely a moral imperative but an economic one.
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It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans – those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.
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Not a great deal is known about the factors in childhood that doubtless underlie a person’s choice of career – I’m talking now about a career to which one is passionately committed, in contradistinction to a career chosen merely as a means of earning a living.
349
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
350
I love this country very much, and I’m proud to live here, but I think our current administration is extreme. These are not merely conservative people, these are extreme right-wing people.
351
352
353
354
Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.
355
356
Disagreement does not necessarily have to be overcome. It may remain an important and constitutive feature of our relations to others and also be seen as something that is merely to be expected in the light of the best explanations we have of how such disagreement arises.
357
Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.
358
359
360
Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
361
To boast of a performance which I cannot beat is merely stupid vanity. And if I can beat it that means there is nothing special about it. What has passed is already finished with. What I find more interesting is what is still to come.
362
363
The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.
364
Never respect men merely for their riches, but rather for their philanthropy; we do not value the sun for its height, but for its use.
365
When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely ‘take pity’ on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.
366
367
368
Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.
369
The CVC and CAG are independent but merely recommendatory. The government often ignores their advice.
370
People are forgiving of v 1.0 of a product if it’s truly innovative and useful. Then you can get away with a lot. But if you’re merely marginally improving the status quo, then you better be rock solid.
371
While the Tan Yan Kee foundation believes that it is merely scratching the surface relative to the gargantuan problems in the education sector, it envisions that one day it will be able to train more teachers and provide much-needed facilities that will transform schools into more conducive learning environments.
372
While Anurag Kashyap is a very chilled out guy and let his actors pitch in with their ideas, Kamal Haasan is an encyclopedia in himself. Merely listening to him enriches one so much.
373
374
Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour – understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
375
376
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
377
A moderate tax on robots, even a temporary tax that merely slows the adoption of disruptive technology, seems a natural component of a policy to address rising inequality. Revenue could be targeted toward wage insurance, to help people replaced by new technology make the transition to a different career.
378
379
It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.
380
The Toothbrush mustache is the most powerful configuration of facial hair the world has ever known. It overpowers whoever touches it. By merely doodling a Toothbrush mustache on a poster, you make a political statement.
381
Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.
382
383
384
The conclusion you first draw about someone is often informed merely by what you’re bringing to it, and it will lead you to underestimating the full depth of the people you have so judged.
385
Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.
386
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
387
There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy‘s entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.
388
Though my conduct on the 10th of August 1792 was the act of my life of which I have most reason to be proud, I will here merely do homage to the worthy martyrs of the national sovereignty and the sworn laws, who, while they supported constitutional royalty, manifested the highest degree of republican virtue.
389
I merely consider myself a father, and one role of a father is to provide financial resources for his family.
390
Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It’s an immense achievement when you can move from your thinking that your partner is merely an idiot to thinking that they are that wonderfully complex thing called a loveable idiot. And often that means having a little bit of a sense of humour about their flaws.
391
Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.
392
393
I have a passion to make something that’s good, not merely OK.
394
Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
395
396
Our warriors and their families don’t ask for much. But there are a few things we’d like. A commander-in-chief who speaks of winning wars and not merely ending wars, calls the enemy by its name, and draws red lines carefully but enforces them ruthlessly.
397
398
399
The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
400
Nothing comes merely by thinking about it.
401
My point is, if you want to achieve anything in life, it is not enough to merely wish for it. You must develop that kind of 4:30 AM discipline that distinguishes you from others.
402
Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).
403
Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.
404
We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character.
405
406
The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.
407
408
409
I have a fundamentally hopeful view about people, and that might merely be a reflection of the fact that I’ve lived an incredibly privileged life in a very wealthy nation without a lot of the struggles that most of the world has to face.
410
The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.
411
Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil. Our great hope lies in developing what is good.
412
413
414
Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.
415
Advertising is, actually, a simple phenomenon in terms of economics. It is merely a substitute for a personal sales force – an extension, if you will, of the merchant who cries aloud his wares.
416
Bringing democratic control to the conduct of foreign policy requires a struggle merely to force the issue onto the public agenda.
417
418
It was okay but then I found myself in that position of being merely a screenwriter. And you are merely the screenwriter, and there’s no way around it. You don’t have the same clout as the director.
419
420
As you are not yet married, and as marriage is the fundamental state of life as well as the unity of the commonwealth, make up your mind whether you are called to this state. If you make up your mind to marry, do not marry merely a good wife: marry a good mother to your children.
421
The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.
422
Getting people to like you is merely the other side of liking them.
423
My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.
424
Personality is essential. It is in every work of art. When someone walks on stage for a performance and has charisma, everyone is convinced that he has personality. I find that charisma is merely a form of showmanship. Movie stars usually have it. A politician has to have it.
425
426
427
As we celebrate a culture of giving, however, we must also sharpen the question of how extreme wealth generation happens in the first place. And we must recognize that just societies cannot be realized merely by the willful distribution of surplus wealth.
428
True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.
429
I write in my study, where I also have my prayer altar. I believe that keeps me focused and gives me positive energy and reminds me that I’m merely the instrument of greater creative forces.
430
I grew up with Scientology – my parents at one point were clerical. It’s a pragmatic philosophy, not merely a belief system. Yeah, it’s had media exposure because certain luminaries do Scientology, but millions of people do it who are not celebrities. It’s not a threat or some cult.
431
The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world – including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.
432
433
434
No sane person should believe that something is subjective merely because it cannot be settled beyond controversy.
435
Simply as an exercise in efficient politics, Obama ’08 rewrote the textbook. His accomplishment was historic and one that transformed how race and politics intersect in our society. Obama is the leading edge of this change, but his success is merely the ripple in a pond that grows deeper every day.
436
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
437
438
439
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
440
441
Science has to be understood in its broadest sense, as a method for comprehending all observable reality, and not merely as an instrument for acquiring specialized knowledge.
442
443
444
445
446
Merely implying bias due to a judge’s ethnic heritage is wrong as a matter of principle and legally illegitimate.
447
Without money honor is merely a disease.
448
449
450
451
Political conflicts distort and disturb a people’s sense of distinction between matters of importance and matters of urgency. What is vital is disguised by what is merely a matter of well being.
452
I would not have a woman go to Congress merely because she is a woman.
453
So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.
454
455
Science merely amplifies the capabilities of human beings. Science gives us the ability to do ill and to do good more than we had, and to question science in this respect is like questioning whether people ought to have two hands or just one, because with two hands they could do more evil than they can with just one.
456
I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.
457
Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
458
I look askance at any movement which assists in making the peacemaker among nations merely a national warrior.
459
460
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
461
462
463
We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it’s really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.
464
However, if the religions in essence merely repeat statements from the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, such a Declaration becomes superfluous; an ethic is more than rights.
465
466
I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.
467
468
We might not object to the statement that Lear deserved to suffer for his folly, selfishness and tyranny; but to assert that he deserved to suffer what he did suffer is to do violence not merely to language but to any healthy moral sense.
469
The Public is merely a multiplied ‘me.’
470
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can’t take off.
471
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
472
The function of combat is not merely to perpetrate violence, but to perpetrate violence on command, instantaneously and reflexively. The function of the service academies is to prepare men for leadership positions where they may someday exercise that command.
473
With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
474
475
Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.
476
477
My early wounds were the English school system among other things. It wasn’t merely the discipline, it was the ways in which boys got what was called the school spirit.
478
Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.
479
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.
480
Desegregation of schools does not automatically transform them into better schools. It is only a step. The larger goal is to see that the education of our youth is not merely desegregated, but that it is excellent.
481
To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.
482
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
483
Being a lawyer is not merely a vocation. It is a public trust, and each of us has an obligation to give back to our communities.
484
I merely dared to say Tebow could be a successful starting quarterback in the National Football League – not a Pro Bowler, mind you, just a guy who could win games his way. Which prompted relentless attacks from anti-Tebow analysts and journalists.
485
486
Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims.
487
I am merely doing my best to represent the Philippines in weightlifting.
488
The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It’s an idea that turns us into victims. I’m saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them.
489
490
491
492
In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge – a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to ‘by how much?’ rather than merely to ‘in which direction?’
493
494
495
God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle – or instruction.
496
No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. It’s because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up and demand – demand – demand change.
497
The immigrant experience in ‘Ilustrado’ was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.
498
499
The phrase ‘perception is reality’ is overused generally. But perception can be reality in monetary policy. The bond market doesn’t act merely on what it sees. It acts on what it expects of the Fed or the government.
500
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
501
Expensive advertising courts us with hints and images. The ordinary kind merely says, Buy.
502
503
504
505
‘Hamlet’ is the best description of grief I’ve read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
506
Happiness is found in doing, not merely possessing.
507
Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket; and do not pull it out, and strike it, merely to show that you have one.
508
In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages – en masse.
509
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn’t preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
510
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.
511
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.
512
I’m merely a fan of fashion from high end to streetwear, from Nike to Comme des Garcons.
513
514
I wouldn’t describe that ‘position’ as ‘parasitic.’ I’d describe that experience as ‘edifying.’ I don’t merely write from a critical intellectual distance. I actually live around here.
515
For most people, the question why be good – as distinguished from merely law abiding – is a simple one. Because God commands it, because the Bible requires it, because good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell.
516
517
Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time – our ‘social graphs’ – into money for others.
518
Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
519
Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
520
If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression.
521
522
Remember that a civilized nation cannot just have one party; if there were only one party, this would merely be a dictatorship. Politics could not advance.
523
524
Why should American atrocities be merely unsettling, but a trip to Hanoi unconscionable?
525
There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
526
When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before.
527
Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They’re really good at it. I think they’re too good. Problem is, what they’re doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won’t accept it.
528
No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence‘s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish.
529
You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.
530
531
The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
532
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
533
Many who think they are workers in politics are really merely tools.
534
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to be mean to the scammers. There are lots of people online who do that. I’m content merely having fun inventing, and I figure any time they’re spending with me is time in which they’re not scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings.
535
Tradition is the great misleader because it’s too easy to follow what has already been done – even though you may think you’re giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself.
536
Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
537
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
538
Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.
539
I honestly believe that we are Arizonans and Americans first, not merely advocates for our respective political parties.
540
The German language speaks Being, while all the others merely speak of Being.
541
I often wish… that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
542
What hadn’t been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.
543
Not merely can people like me write things that would never have been printed before but I think an enormously dramatic change has taken place in public opinion, possibly for the wrong reasons.
544
545
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
546
Because of the nature of Moore‘s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.
547
We are merely the stars tennis-balls, struck and bandied which way please them.
548
The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.
549
Instead of isolating our school and our many subjects from the every day world, we intend to plant it not merely in the French capital, but in what for next summer at least will be the focal point, the capital of the entire civilized world.
550
The decision to use recognition as an on-the-spot bonus instead of merely pay increases is a fascinating one, because pay increases can create new mental anchors for how much the person feels happy earning, whereas the social recognition program is ongoing, unexpected, and harder to form a mental anchor around.
551
552
The fact that I have been successful merely means that I can write and illustrate in my own way.
553
554
Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian‘s point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone – all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.
555
556
557
The amygdala is indeed crucial for monitoring our environment and deciding what’s worth getting worked up over. Once the amygdala determines this, however, it merely trips another circuit to actually produce the panic.
558
Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor.
559
The passenger pigeon, the golden toad, the Caspian tiger: they are all gone, and other species hang by a thread. Our actions are not merely driving other species to extinction: we threaten our own survival, too, by destabilising ecosystems and destroying biodiversity.
560
Under Marxism-Leninism, the self-proclaimed ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, individuals do not possess inherent value. People are merely a tool to achieve the ends of the collective nation-state. The idea may sound inhumane, but it is as fundamental to the CCP as the Bill of Rights is to Americans.
561
A lot of actors are perfectionists, besides merely being egotists.
562
563
564
A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed.
565
We will be safer from terrorist attack only when we have earned the respect of all other nations instead of their fear, respect for our values and not merely our weapons.
566
567
In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it’s nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar.
568
Children are extremely perceptive and absorb what goes on around them long before they can talk or even comprehend language. They are like finely tuned receivers that pick up much more than is merely said. They are receptive and attuned to every mood, feeling, and change that goes on in people around them.
569
570
Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.
571
572
573
574
Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.
575
In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope of further favors.
576
Without question, Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler is my most recognizable partner and my favorite to work with over the years. We endured several things together that reach far beyond merely signing on and subsequently saying ‘good night everybody’ at the end of the show.
577
The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.
578
579
Doing political comedy you do feel guilty that you aren’t trying to change problems, you are merely exploiting them for your own financial gain.
580
I like to write my own songs rather than merely singing what has been handed over to you.
581
The average Nigerian person has come to reconcile himself with the fact that his or her social progress remain essentially in his or her hands in collaboration with other fellow Nigerians and not merely relying on what government alone could provide for him or her.
582
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.
583
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.
584
585
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
