I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
Walt Whitman

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
Walt Whitman

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.
Plato

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato

The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.
Plato

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Plato

Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
Jonathan Swift

It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.
Thomas Paine

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.
Karl Marx

All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
Leo Tolstoy

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child's board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.
Voltaire

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
William Osler

Are you laboring under the impression that I read these memoranda of yours? I can't even lift them.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

You are priests, not social or political leaders. Let us not be under the illusion that we are serving the Gospel through an exaggerated interest in the wide field of temporal problems.
Pope John Paul II

The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.
James Madison

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
Marcus Aurelius

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee and I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.
John D. Rockefeller

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.
Clint Eastwood