#y

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it. One hope too like dispair For prudence to smother, I can give not what men call love: But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And heaven rejects not: The desire of the moth for the star, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow? ↗

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

#percy-shelly #love

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not, but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#christian #christianity #god #religion #men

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#men

Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers? ↗

— R. Scott Bakker

#men

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. ↗

— Russell Banks

#men

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations. ↗

— Jean Lorrain

#cowardice #decadence #government #law #nature

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#commonwealth #duty #finest-hour #men

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#men

The resentment I felt inside was not hatred for being imprisoned or for Victor who had betrayed me but something deeper: a rebellion against the very way of things that condemned men to be imprisoned inside their own identities. ↗

— MacDonald Harris

#resentment #men

Wait a minute. You expect me to stay overnight in a house with four single men? Sean grinned. We're perfect gentlemen, Kim. Everyone knows that. Don't let us worry you. I'm not worried about my reputation, I'm worried about the state of the bathrooms. ↗

— Jennifer Ashley

#liam-morrisey #men