Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact.
Henry Mayhew

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.
Herbert Read

Our first remark on this subject is that the ministry is an office, and not merely a work.
Charles Hodge

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.
Lukas Foss

Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend.
James Weldon Johnson

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.
William Kingdon Clifford

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.
Edward Sapir

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.
Anthony Holden

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
Samuel Ullman

Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism.
Edward Bond

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

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.
Christian Lous Lange

Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.
Kenneth L. Pike

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.
Anthony Holden

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.
Leo Ornstein

Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do not wish to happen.
Charles W. Chesnutt

Successful model? That's a myth. The year I modeled was the most painful year of my life. Editors would always talk to you in the third person as though you were merely a piece of merchandise.
Jessica Lange

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.
Brian Ferneyhough

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.
Ed Harris

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton