PEOPLE

Related Subjects: Crowd, Democracy, Equality, Freedom, Government

1. Early up, and reading in the publick prints about the oil inquiry in Washington, I was struck with the lack of indignation it arouseth, and I wondered what it would be that would be important enough to make a people angry, and I thought it would be something not worth getting angry about, like in the days when the big, strong Americans made so great a stir about German opera a year or so after the war. But of official perfidy they seem oblivious.—F. P. A., The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys
   

2. It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men.—SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Woman's Right to Suffrage
   

3. The General Public has no notion
   Of what's behind the scenes.
   They vote at times with some emotion
   But don't know what it means.
   Doctored information
   Is all they have to judge things by;
   The hidden situation
   Develops secretly.—AUDEN & ISHERWOOD, The Dog Beneath the Skin
   

4. No doubt but ye are the people.—Bible, Job 12:2
   

5. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.—BURKE, Speech on Conciliation
   

6. A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.—BURKE, Speech on Conciliation
   

7. "The people may eat grass": hasty words, which fly abroad irrevocable,—and will send back tidings.—CARLYLE, The French Revolution
   

8. The Public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble.—CARLYLE, Journal
   

9. Four thousand people cross London Bridge every day, mostly fools.—CARLYLE
   

10. When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.—DALE CARNEGIE, How to Win Friends
    

11. People may be divided into two classes: the people who like to drink the dregs of their cup, and the people whose instinctive preference it is to leave the dregs. This is a distinction which cuts deep into the moral life. The people of the first class are usually counted the more interesting, and necessarily they are able to extract more out of life, more pain, and possibly more pleasure, though one may question the quality of the extract.—HAVELOCK ELLIS, The Art of Life
    

12. I painfully reflect that in almost every political controversy of the last fifty years the leisured classes, the educated classes, the wealthy classes, the titled classes have been in the wrong. The common people—the toilers, the men of uncommon sense—these have been responsible for nearly all of the social reform measures which the world accepts today.—GLADSTONE
    

13. If you inquire what the people are like here, I must answer, "The same as everywhere!"—GOETHE, The Sorrows of Werther
    

14. There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.—HAZLITT, On Living to One's Self
    

15. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.—JEFFERSON, Declaration of Independence
    

16. Cherish the spirit of our people and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and assemblies, judges and governors, shall all become wolves.—JEFFERSON, The Price of Liberty
    

17. Two things only the people anxiously desire—bread and circus games.—JUVENAL, Satires
    

18. No doubt but ye are the People—absolute, strong, and wise;
    Whatever your heart has desired ye have not withheld from your eyes.
    On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!—KIPLING, The Islanders
    

19. The public seldom forgives twice.—LAVATER
    

20. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you
    can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of
    the people all the time.—LINCOLN
    

21. If the good people, in their wisdom, shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too f amiliar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.—LINCOLN
    

22. If the people are poor, I am the poorest.—EMPEROR NINTOKU
    

23. The People! They live in the abyss, the poet lives on the mountain top. To the people the end of life is the life created for them; to the poet the end of life is the life that he creates for himself; life has a stifling grip upon the people's throat,—it is the poet's musician. The poet ever strives to save the people; the people ever strive to destroy the poet.—SEAN O'CASEY, The Shadow of a Gunman
    

24. He that does anything for the public is accounted to do it for nobody.—Proverb
    

25. Tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us. We are nothing but the fist of the people beating their oppressors.—PENG TEH-HUAI, Snow: Red Star Over China
    

26. The public must and will be served.—WILLIAM PENN, Fruits of Solitude
    

27. Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do so.—BERTRAND RUSSELL
    

28. The people, yes, the people,
    Everyone who got a letter today
    And those the mail-carrier missed.
    
    The women at the cookstoves preparing meals, in a sewing corner
    mending, in a basement laundering, woman the homemaker,
    The woman at the factory tending a stitching machine, some of them the mainstay of the jobless man at home cooking, laundering,
    
    Streetwalking jobhunter, walkers alive and keen, sleepwalkers drifting along, the stupefied and hopeless down-and-outs, the ganje fighters who will die fighting. . . .—CARL SANDBURG, The People, Yes
    

29. The people is a lighted believer and hoper—and this is to be held against them?
    The panderers and cheaters are to have their way in trading on these lights of the People?
    Not always, no, not always, for the people is a knower too.—CARL SANDBURG, The People, Yes
    

30. The people is a monolith,
    A mover, a dirt farmer,
    A desperate hoper.—CARL SANDBURG, The People, Yes
    

31. The people have come far and can look back and say, "We will go farther yet."
    The people is a plucked goose and a shorn sheep of legalized fraud
    And the people is one of those mountain slopes holding a volcano of retribution,
    
    Slow in all things, slow in its gathered wrath, slow in its onward heave,
    Slow in its asking: "Where are we now? What time is it?"—CARL SANDBURG, The People, Yes
    

32. The people is Everyman, everybody.
    Everybody is you and me and all others.
    What everybody says is what we all say.—CARL SANDBURG, The People, Yes
    

33. "The people is a myth, an abstracion."
    And what myth would you put in place of the people?
    And what abstraction would you exhange for this one?
    And when has creative man not toiled deep in myth?
    And who fights for a belly full only and where is any name worth remembering for anything else than the human abstraction woven through it with invisible things?—CARL SANDBURG, The People, Yes
    

34. Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens.—SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It
    

35. Each man of you, individually, walketh with the tread of a fox, but collectively ye are geese.—SOLON, Of the Athenians allowing themselves to be duped into dictatorship by Peisistratus.
    

36. You got to have patience. Why Tom, us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone .. . Rich f ellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'.—JOHN STEINBACK, The Grapes of Wrath
    

37. In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.—STENDHAL
    

38. No organizations of peoples have a permanent ownership of even the land they collectively live on. They have only a lease.—DOROTHY THOMPSON, On the Record
    

39. I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.—MARK TWAIN
    

40. The public be damned.—WILLIAM H. VANDERBILT
    

41. The two kinds of people on earth that I mean
    Are the people who lift and the people who lean.—ELLA W. WILCOX, To Lift or to Lean
    

42. The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated standards of right and wrong is the air all governments must henceforth breathe if they would live.—WOODROW WILSON