Top 100 Quotes About Great Men
#1. Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.
Jacob Burckhardt
#3. Roger Scruton is one of our great men of speculation
David Willetts
#4. Great men tell the truth and are never believed. Lesser men are always believed, but seldom have the brains or the courage to tell the truth.
Kenneth Roberts
#5. The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#6. Obama likes to quote great men but will never be a great man himself. I can't stand it when our leader goes around apologizing for who we are.
Joe Wurzelbacher
#7. I'm not sexist in any way - sexism is another form of violence, and there are many great men in this world.
Betty Williams
#8. If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#9. Great men suffer hours of depression through introspection and self-doubt. That is why they are great. That is why you will find modesty and humility the characteristics of such men.
Bruce Barton
#10. I don't believe in the Great Man theory of science or history. There are no great men, just men standing on the shoulders of other men and what they have done.
Jacque Fresco
#12. Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Dick Winters
#13. I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
Booker T. Washington
#15. The great men think, and you and I [also] think. But there is a difference.
Swami Vivekananda
#16. Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.
Charles Caleb Colton
#17. Great men are not born great, they grow great . . .
Mario Puzo
#19. Great men, they're not like you or me. They have other needs. Other rhythms. It's what sets them apart. But sometimes they go so far into the void we lose sight of them. They lose sight of us.
James S.A. Corey
#21. Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.
Leslie Stephen
#22. One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.
G.K. Chesterton
#23. Great men always have dogs.
Ouida
#24. Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#25. Great men have allied themselves with the angels at a terrible price to themselves. Evil men indulge their slightest whim for small satisfactions while accepting the fate of burning in Hell.
Mario Puzo
#26. A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#28. Great men look greater than yesterday.
Toba Beta
#31. I have learned the truth of the observation that the more one approaches great men the more one finds that they are men.
Bernard Baruch
#32. Great men show politeness in a particular way; a smile suffices to assure you that you are welcome, and keep about their avocations as if you were a member of the family.
John James Audubon
#33. It's always the same: mediocrities are over-valued and great men are rejected.
Anton Webern
#34. All great men pay some price for their dreams, but cowards remain in debt to fear.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#35. The Lord's visitations of distinguished favor are always to the diligent. That great men may not be ashamed of honest vocations, the greatest that have ever lived have been contented, happy, and honored while in the pursuit of humble trades.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#36. The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acpuire it.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#37. I think my best work has been in France with great men. It's been my great fortune to work with really great men - with Olivier Assayas, Raoul Ruiz, Jacques Rivette. I am tutored by them.
Emmanuelle Beart
#38. When he overheard the boys whispering that he was a queer, he said he regarded that as a compliment since so many of the world's great men had been homosexual. Alas, I've been sentenced to a life mundane heterosexuality. I can only hope that a few of you will be more fortunate.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#39. The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.
Jules Renard
#40. The Declaration of Independence to which these great men affixed their signatures is much more than a political document. It constitutes a spiritual manifesto-revel ation, if you will-declaring not for this nation only, but for all nations, the source of man's rights.
Ezra Taft Benson
#41. In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer - the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.
A.J.P. Taylor
#42. There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning.
Calvin Coolidge
#43. I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.
Max Brooks
#44. If the measure of a man was the size of his hat, these were great men indeed.
Joe Abercrombie
#45. The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. He is not a great man. None of us are great men. We are just caught in the wave of history.
Dave Malloy
#48. The lessons of great men and women are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves; they are lost unless they drive our sluggish wills forward in the direction of their highest ideas.
Jane Addams
#49. Great men in teaching weak men to reflect have set them on the road to error.
Luc De Clapiers
#50. The age does not believe in great men, because it does not possess any.
Benjamin Disraeli
#52. Pride is a fault that great men blush not to own: it is the ennobled offspring of self-love; though, it must be confessed, grave and pompous vanity, Iike a fat plebeian in a rove of office, does very often assume its name.
Joanna Baillie
#53. The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.
William Hazlitt
#54. For us the great men are not those who solved the problems, but those whodiscovered them.
Albert Schweitzer
#55. It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.
Havelock Ellis
#56. Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.
Horace Mann
#58. An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men.
Thomas Fuller
#59. Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.
John Ruskin
#60. It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
Charles Dickens
#62. If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?
Virginia Woolf
#63. You can recollect the sayings of great men, you treasure up verse of renowned poets; ought you not be equally profound in your knowledge of the words of God, so that you may be able to quote them readily when you would solve a difficulty or overthrow a doubt?
Charles Spurgeon
#64. The lives of great men and women are miracles of patience and perseverance.
Mary Baker Eddy
#67. Great men undertake great things because they are great; fools, because they think them easy.
Luc De Clapiers
#68. All great men and women had experienced times of wilderness,these moments precedes the dawn of self awakening, greatest potential and success.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#69. No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#70. The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.
Isaac D'Israeli
#71. Observe the great Advantage and Benefit, the Privilege and Prerogative that Christ's Servants have beyond all others; Christ writes his Letters to them; there is not a word written to Kings and great Men; but it is to shew his Servants things to come to pass
James Durham
#73. There is no more great men; there is only great committees.
Marshall McLuhan
#74. Great crisis produce great men and great deeds of courage.
John F. Kennedy
#75. ...The "democratic spirit"... [or the campaign to make everyone the same] leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism.
C.S. Lewis
#76. Great bodies die but great minds don't die! Inside the tomb of great men lay dead body's but at the library of great men lay the living minds of dead bodies!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#78. There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.
George S. Patton
#79. To please great men is not the last degree of praise.
Horace
#81. The Dalai Lama once said that 'If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change!' This is a great thought! And great thoughts belong to great men only!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. Admiration of great men, living or dead, naturally evokes imitation of them in a greater or less degree.
Samuel Smiles
#83. I have talked with great men, and I do not see how they differ from others.
Abraham Lincoln
#84. It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
William Ellery Channing
#85. Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#86. The only good luck many great men ever had was being born with the ability and determination to overcome bad luck.
Channing Pollock
#87. Do not all great men and women have a few birds in their head?
Edward Stanton
#89. If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
Karl Popper
#90. Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.
Henry David Thoreau
#91. We are often infinitely mistaken, and take the falsest measures, when we envy the happiness of rich and great men; we know not the inward canker that eats out all their joy and delight, and makes them really much more miserable than ourselves.
Joseph Hall
#92. Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.
Walter Savage Landor
#93. Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce Great Men
this and nothing else is its duty
Friedrich Nietzsche
#95. The great secret possessed by the great men of all ages was their ability to contact and release the powers of their subconscious mind. You can do the same.
Joseph Murphy
#96. It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#97. Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.
Thomas Carlyle
#98. I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.
Mary Hunter Austin
#100. We want great men who, when fortune frowns, will not be discouraged. ~Colonel Henry Knox
David McCullough
