The Indispensable Man Quotes

#1. He found himself in the ironic position of being the indispensable man in a political world that regarded all leaders as disposable.

Joseph J. Ellis

#2. Love in my case is not indispensable to pleasure, nor is respect. Is it possible, therefore, that the disgust, the humiliation begin afterward, when a man subdues you and violates you at his pleasure solely because now you belong to him, love or not, respect or not?

Elena Ferrante

#3. I was fascinated by the [operation] of a U-boat ... where every single man was an indispensable part of the whole. Every submariner, I am sure, has experienced in his heart [the joy of] the task entrusted to him [and] felt as rich as a king.

Karl Donitz

#4. [T]he one indispensable ingredient of science fiction [is] a belief in a world being changed by man's intellect, a conviction that what was being written could really happen.

James Gunn

#5. There is no indispensable man.

Woodrow Wilson

#6. There is no indispensable man. The government will not collapse and go to pieces if any one of the gentlemen who are seeking to be entrusted with its guidance should be left at home.

Woodrow Wilson

#7. More and more people think of the critic as an indispensable middle man between writer and reader, and would no more read a book alone, if they could help it, than have a baby alone.

Randall Jarrell

#8. The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system.

Bertrand Russell

#9. A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes he is no longer indispensable.

Richard E. Byrd

#10. Man was so engineered by God that the presence of the Creator within the creature is indispensable to His humanity.

W. Ian Thomas

#11. In wakeful nights, as one may fancy, the wild soul of the man, tossing amid these vortices, would hail any light of a decision for them as a veritable light from Heaven; any making-up of his mind, so blessed, indispensable for him there,

Thomas Carlyle

#12. I consider an intimate knowledge of the Bible an indispensable quality of a well educated man.

Robert Andrews Millikan

#13. Far more indispensable then food for the physical body is spiritual nourishment for the soul. One can do without food for a considerable time, but a man of the spirit cannot exist for a single second without spiritual nourishment.

Mahatma Gandhi

#14. To a man of liberal education, the study of history is not only useful, and important, but altogether indispensable, and with regard to the history contained in the Bible ... it is not so much praiseworthy to be acquainted with as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.

John Quincy Adams

#15. By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man
man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.

Robert A. Heinlein

#16. I hold no man to be indispensable for the welfare of the country.

Mahatma Gandhi

#17. I do not oppose the insane asylum - but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.

Eugene V. Debs

#18. A man's 'original and natural right' to make all contracts that are 'intrinsically obligatory,' and to coerce the fulfillment of them, is one of the most valuable and indispensable of all human possessions.

Lysander Spooner

#19. I was for some time quite beside myself and could not believe that Providence could have required the presence of this indispensable man in the other world so soon.

Joseph Haydn

#20. Of the three sorts of knowledge proper to a child, the knowledge of God, of man, and of the universe,
the knowledge of God ranks first in importance, is indispensable, and most happy-making.

Charlotte Mason

#21. I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough.

Henry David Thoreau

#22. Labor, if it were not necessary for existence, would be indispensable for the happiness of man.

Samuel Johnson

#23. in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.

Theodore Roosevelt

#24. All the world over it is true that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways, like a wave on the streamlet, tossed hither and thither with every eddy of its tide. A determinate purpose in life and a steady adhesion to it through all disadvantages, are indispensable conditions of success.

William Morley Punshon

#25. Food that is necessary for man's existence is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is the common property of society as a whole. It is only the surplus that is private property and can be safely left to individual commercial enterprise.

Maximilien Robespierre

#26. Those who challenge the law in one or another of its aspects weaken the whole legal structure of society. For one man to disobey a law he does not like is to invite others to disobey another law which he may regard as indispensable to his own livelihood - or life.

Robert Kennedy

#27. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

Paulo Freire

#28. The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth.

Ananda Coomaraswamy