The present condition of fame is merely fashion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.
Margaret Mead

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Aldous Huxley

Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.
Thomas Aquinas

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.
Lucille Ball

Money and success don't change people; they merely amplify what is already there.
Will Smith

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Eric Hoffer

Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike

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.
John Updike

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.
John Stuart Mill

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.
John Stuart Mill

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
Herman Melville

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
David Hume

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.
Henry L. Stimson

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.
Carter G. Woodson