The individual activity of one man with backbone will do more than a thousand men with a mere wishbone.
William J. H. Boetcker

The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.
Georg Simmel

The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi.
Gustav Mahler

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
Rebecca West

The mere assemblage of peace loving people to interchange convincing reasons for their common faith, mere exhortation and argument to the public in favor of peace in general fall short of the mark.
Elihu Root

The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.
James Agee

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Lord Chesterfield

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted.
Laurence Housman

The mere fact of an American being present could help save the lives of innocent people. That's why I believe in the importance of bearing witness, to become a voice for the voiceless.
Bianca Jagger

The mere holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent, or employer, or ruler.
Samuel Morse

The mere imparting of information is not education.
Carter G. Woodson

The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends.
Logan Pearsall Smith

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.
Edward Koch

The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.
Douglas Adams

The mere thought of divorce terrified me. To me, divorce symbolized failure.
Annette Funicello

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork.
Walter Lang

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
David Herbert Lawrence

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
David Herbert Lawrence

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton