| Author | Quote |
Topic |
|---|
| MacArthur, Gen Douglas | "In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. " | History |
| MacArthur, Gen Douglas | "Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would yield every honor which has been accorded by war. " | History |
| MacArthur, Gen Douglas | "They died hard, those savage men-like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them. " | History |
| MacArthur, Gen Douglas | "Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories. " | History |
| Macaulay, Thomas B. | "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. " | Poetry |
| MacDonald, George E. | "If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give. " | Friendship |
| MacDonald, Robert D. | "One German makes a philosopher, two a public meeting, three a war. " | History |
| Machiavelli, Niccolo | "No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution. " | Business |
| Mackenzie, Gordon | "It's hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It's about experimenting and discovering. " | Business |
| MacLaine, Shirley | "Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends. " | Friendship |
| MacLeod, Fiona | "A handful of pine-seed will cover mountains with the green majesty of a forest. I, too, will set my face to the wind and throw my handful of seed on high. " | Nature |
| MacMillan, Harold | "No man succeeds without a good woman behind him. Wife or mother, if it is both, he is twice blessed indeed. " | Success |
| Maddocks, Melvin | "Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout. " | Art |
| Madison, James | "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. " | Government |
| Madison, James | "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. " | Government |
| Mae Brown, Rita | "Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment. " | Experience |
| Maher, Bill | "Jim Bakker spells his name with two k's because three would be too obvious. " | Religion |
| Maher, Bill | "The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs. " | Religion |
| Mahler, Gustav | "If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. " | Music |
| Mallarme, Stephen | "It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. " | Poetry |
| Malraux, Andre | "To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less. " | Business |
| Manchester, William | "The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses. " | Nature |
| Manchester, William | "Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself. " | History |
| Manchester, William | "An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome. " | History |
| Manchester, William | "It would be inaccurate to say that Churchill and I conversed. Like Gladstone speaking to Victoria, he addressed me as though I were a one-man House of Commons. It was superb. " | History |
| Mandino, Og | "Do all things with love. " | Love |
| Mann, Thomas | "War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. " | War |
| Mansfield, Katherine | "I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing. " | Friendship |
| Marden, Orison Swett | "All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers. " | Imagination |
| Marden, Orison Swett | "Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. " | Nature |
| Marden, Orison Swett | "The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. " | Nature |
| Mark, Mary Ellen | "I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. " | Art |
| Marquis, Don | "Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates. " | Business |
| Marquis, Don | "Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. " | Poetry |
| Marshalov, Boris | "Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens - and then everybody disagrees. " | Government |
| Martin, Steve | "You know what your problem is, it's that you haven't seen enough movies - all of life's riddles are answered in the movies. " | Movie |
| Marx, Karl | "The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them. " | Government |
| Matisse, Henri | "Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "I have been no more than a medium, as it were. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "There are always flowers for those who want to see them. " | Nature |
| Matisse, Henri | "Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. " | Art |
| Matisse, Henri | "A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light. " | Art |
| Matthews, Brander | "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it. " | Education |
| Maugham, William Somerset | "Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species. " | Love |
| Maugham, William Somerset | "The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind. " | Success |
| Maugham, William Somerset | "We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. " | Love |
| Maupassant, Guy de | "Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. " | Patriotism |
| Maupassant, Guy de | "War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill? " | War |
| Maurier, Daphne du | "All autobiography is self-indulgent. " | Art |
| Maurois, Andre | "The most important quality in a leader is that of being acknowledged as such. All leaders whose fitness is questioned are clearly lacking in force. " | Business |
| Maurois, Andre | "Business is a combination of war and sport. " | Business |
| McCarthy, Colman | "Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals. " | War |
| McElcheran, William | "For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one. " | Art |
| McGovern, George | "The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation." | War |
| McGovern, George | "It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U. S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the senate. " | War |
| McGovern, George | "I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. " | War |
| McGuire, Al | "I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated. " | Education |
| McIntyre, Andy | "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance! " | Education |
| McLaren, Norman | "If I find a film dull, I find it infinitely more entertaining to watch the scratches. " | Movie |
| McLaughlin, Mignon | "It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not. " | Friendship |
| McLaughlin, Mignon | "Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers. " | Society |
| McLeod, Doug | "I still say a church steeple with a lightening rod on top shows a lack of confidence. " | Religion |
| McLuhan, Marshall | "Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. " | Art |
| McLuhan, Marshall | "Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools. " | Technology |
| McNealy, Scott | "The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it. " | Technology |
| McNealy, Scott | "Computers shouldn't be unusable. You don't need to know how to work a telephone switch to make a phone call, or how to use the Hoover Dam to take a shower, or how to work a nuclear-power plant to turn on the lights. " | Technology |
| McNealy, Scott | "Only a monopolist could study a business and ruin it by giving away products. " | Business |
| Mead, Margaret | "Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess. " | Science |
| Mead, Edward | "Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers. " | Computer |
| Medawar, Peter | "Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. " | Society |
| Meehan, Francis | "Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself. " | War |
| Mencius, | "Friendship is one mind in two bodies. " | Friendship |
| Mencken, H. L. | "Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. " | Government |
| Mencken, H. L. | "It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. " | Religion |
| Mencken, H. L. | "The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. " | Life |
| Mencken, H. L. | "We must respect the other fellow's religion,but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. " | Religion |
| Mencken, H. L. | "Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another. " | Love |
| Mencken, H. L. | "War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands. " | Peace |
| Mencken, H. L. | "Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. " | History |
| Mencken, H. L. | "Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age. " | History |
| Merriam, Eve | "I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?" " | War |
| Merrick, David | "It's not enough that I should succeed - others should fail. " | Success |
| Michals, Duane | "Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if.."; And then do it. " | Imagination |
| Michals, Duane | "I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see. " | Imagination |
| Michelangelo, | "Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. " | Art |
| Michelangelo, | "The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection." | Art |
| Michelangelo, | "A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. " | Art |
| Michelangelo, | "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. " | Imagination |
| Midler, Bette | "I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes. " | Art |
| Midler, Bette | "I married a German. Every night I dress up as Poland and he invades me. " | Art |
| Mill, John Stuart | "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. " | War |
| Mill, John Stuart | "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. " | Technology |
| Mille, Henry | "The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. " | Art |
| Miller, Dennis | "Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time. " | Religion |
| Miller, Gregory | "When artwork is involved, it's almost assumed that it's going to travel. It's too hot to stay here. " | Art |
| Miller, Warren | "Don't take life seriously because you can't come out of it alive. " | Life |
| Miller, Jonathon | "In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners. " | Religion |
| Miller, Alice Duer | "If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue. " | Friendship |
| Miller, Arthur | "Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. " | Life |
| Milne, A. A. | "To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks. " | Education |
| Milne, A. A. | "If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you. " | Love |
| Mistinguett, | "A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know. " | Love |
| Mitchell, Henry | "The choirs left the main tune and soared two octaves past heaven in a descant to rattle the bones and surge the heart. " | Art |
| Mitterrand, Francois | "France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history. " | History |
| Mizner, Wilson | "When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research. " | Science |
| Mondale, Walter F. | "What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers? " | Computer |
| Montagu, Ashley | "The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease. " | Science |
| Montaigne, Michel de | "I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. " | Education |
| Montaigne, Michel de | "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I. " | Love |
| Montapert, Alfred A. | "All lasting business is built on friendship. " | Business |
| Moore, Henry | "It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. " | Art |
| Moore, Marianne | "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. " | Poetry |
| Moore, Henry | "A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds. " | Art |
| Moore, George | "The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough. " | Love |
| Moore, George | "A great artist is always before his time or behind it. " | Art |
| Morgan, Donald | "Moral: a peerless maxim enumerated by God in his Holy Bible, such as that of Deut. 23:1, if your testicles are crushed or your male member missing, you must never enter a sanctuary of the Lord. " | Religion |
| Morison, Elting E. | "The executive exists to make sensible exceptions to general rules. " | Business |
| Morley, John | "Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. " | Religion |
| Morrison, Jim | "Film spectators are quiet vampires. " | Movie |
| Morrison, Toni | "She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind. " | Friendship |
| Morrow, Lance | "The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out. " | History |
| Morrow, James | "There are no atheists in foxholes isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes. " | War |
| Mossberg, Walter | "Why shouldn't a PC work like a refrigerator or a toaster? " | Computer |
| Mossberg, Walter | "I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world. " | Technology |
| Mossberg, Walter | "If you walked into Netscape headquarters with a plain old modem from CompUSA they'd think it was a garage-door opener. " | Technology |
| Mumford, Lewis | "The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion. " | Government |
| Mumford, Lewis | "Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. " | Technology |
| Murdoch, Rupert | "The buck stops with the guy who signs the checks. " | Business |
| Murrow, Edward R. | "Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts. " | History |
| Murrow, Edward R. | "A satellite has no conscience. " | Science |
| Murrow, Edward R. | "The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it. " | Technology |
| Murrow, Edward R. | "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. " | History |
| Musset, Alfred de | "Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. " | Poetry |
| Muste, A. J. | "There is no way to peace; peace is the way. " | Peace |
| Muzzey, David S. | "Faith is courage; it is creative while despair is always destructive. " | Faith |
