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

For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role.
Margaret J. Wheatley

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.
Friedrich August von Hayek

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
H. P. Lovecraft

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

My observation is that women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership.
James Dobson

My honour was not yielded, but conquered merely.
Cleopatra

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.
Hannah Arendt

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.
Paul Cezanne

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

The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for posterity- unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual posterity.
Henry Clay

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
Ram Dass

One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
Henrik Ibsen

There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
Henry Van Dyke

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

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Simone Weil

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.
Karl Von Clausewitz

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.
Sydney J. Harris

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
Tom Robbins