Merely Quotes

Science has to be understood in its broadest sense, as a method for comprehending all observable reality, and not merely as an instrument for acquiring specialized knowledge.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

So somebody told me that if I wasn't a coffee drinker yet, by the end of college I'd have to be, because a math major is so tough I would have to stay up very late. I was going to need coffee to do that. Well, merely because they said that, I never drank coffee in college, never got addicted to it, never needed it.

Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.

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

Not in purity or in holiness merely, for in Paradise man was holy, and he shall be holy when redeemed through the sacrifice of Christ and made an heir of heaven.

I soon discovered, after I became chairman of the NEH, that, for a number of academics, the truth was not merely irrelevant - it no longer existed.

What a man calls his "conscience" is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.

In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

Men like me, who merely wish to establish political freedom, will in such circumstances lose all their influence, and others will get influence who may become dangerous to all established interests whatsoever.

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

The atom bomb was no "great decision." It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Upholding human rights is not merely compatible with fighting terrorism, it is essential.

Most of the things we decide are not what we know to be the best. We say yes, merely because we are driven into a corner and must say something.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

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.