I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work. Or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickle’s-worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do. And there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe. And our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller. And all we say is, Please, at least leave us alone in our living-rooms. Let me have my toaster, and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone. Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I won’t want you to ride. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being. Goddamit. My life has value! ibid.
Mote: You are a gentleman and a gamester, sir.
Armado: I confess both. They are both the varnish of a complete man. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost I ii 42-43
Countess: Why? Art thou the man?
Talbot: I am indeed. William Shakespeare, The First Part of Henry the Sixth II iv 47-48
God made him and therefore let him pass for a man. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice I ii 59
If you think I come hither as a lion … I am a man. As other men are. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, BBC 2016, players in the forest
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar I ii 95-96
Men at some time were masters of their fates. ibid. I ii 140, Cassius to Brutus
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights. ibid. I ii 193-194, Caesar
Would he were fatter! but I fear him not. ibid. I ii 197
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. ibid. IV iii 217
He was a man, take him for all in all;
I shall not look upon his like again. William Shakespeare, Hamlet I ii 186-187, Hamlet to Horatio
Quarrelling, drabbing – you may go so far. ibid. II i 25-26, Polonius to Reynaldo to spy on Laertes
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither though, by your smiling you seem to say so. ibid. II ii, Hamlet
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. ibid. III ii
Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping. ibid. II ii 561
I am myself indifferent honest. But yet I could accuse me of such things, that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. ibid. III i 123-140, Hamlet to Ophelia
What should a man do but by merry? ibid. III ii 117-118, Hamlet to Ophelia
What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? ibid. IV iv 33-35, Hamlet’s soliloquy
cf.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. ibid. IV v 42-43, Ophelia to King
4Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure II ii 177
I never found man that knew how to love himself. William Shakespeare, Othello I iii 313-314, Iago
It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man. ibid. I iii @334
A horned man’s a monster and a beast. ibid. Othello IV i 60, Othello
Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense? Othello, Globe Theatre production, Sky Arts 2012
Timon: What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?
Apemantus: Give it to the beasts, to be rid of the men. William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens IV iii
Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth I vii 72-74, Macbeth
Are you a man? ibid. III iv 57, Lady Macbeth
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none. ibid. I vii 46-47, Macbeth
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
And to be more than where you were, you would
Be so much more the man. ibid. I vii @49, Lady Macbeth
What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? – A fish, he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell … There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. William Shakespeare, The Tempest II ii @24, Trinculo
I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed. ibid.
The bells which toll for mankind are – most of them, anyway – like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound. Peter Medawar, The Future of Man, 1959
That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Neil Armstrong
I have always felt that man is a stranger on this planet. A total stranger. I always played with the fancy maybe a contagion from outer space is the seed of man. Eric Hoffer, writer & sociologist
Lastly, in the deepest and dimmest recesses of the unconscious, there lurks the nature of man himself. On it, clearly, he will concentrate the supreme effort of his mind and of his creative initiative. Mankind will not have ceased to crawl before God, Tsar and Capital only in order to surrender meekly to dark laws of heredity and blind sexual selection. Man will strive to control his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the height of his conscious mind, and to bring clarity into them; to channel his will-power into his unconscious depths; and in this way he will lift himself into new eminence. Vladimir Lenin
‘I love mankind,’ he said, ‘but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.’ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Man is an ape with possibilities. Roy Chapman Andrews
Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature. Moliere aka Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, Le Tartuffe
Men are vile inconstant toads. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter 12th June 1710
It’s not the men in my life that counts – it’s the life in my men. Mae West, I’m No Angel, film 1933
Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from. Mae West
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. George Orwell
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. George Orwell