Consider the Essay as a political pamphlet on the Revolution side, and the fact that it was the Whig gospel for a century, and you will see its working merit.
~By Frederick Pollock ~
Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.
~By Sallust ~
Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
~By James Russell Lowell ~
It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.
~By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~
I'm not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian - I'm just not interested in that argument.
~By T-Bone Burnett ~
A book is worth a few francs; we Germans can afford to destroy those. We all may not appreciate artistic merit, but cash value is another matter.
~By Paul Scofield ~
What indeed is life, unless so far as it is enjoyed? It does not merit the name.
~By William Godwin ~
Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment.
~By George Byron ~
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
~By Nathaniel Hawthorne ~
Should slavery be abolished there, (and it is an event, which, from these circumstances, we may reasonably expect to be produced in time) let it be remembered, that the Quakers will have had the merit of its abolition.
~By Thomas Clarkson ~
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
~By Voltaire ~
But if our sex would but well consider and rationally ponder, they will perceive and find that it is neither words nor place that can advance them, but worth and merit.
~By Margaret Cavendish ~
I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life.
~By Bernice Johnson Reagon ~
Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.
~By Thomas Aquinas ~
We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.
~By Kary Mullis ~
Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them.
~By Marquis De Vauvenargues ~
Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.
~By James Madison ~
If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit Awards.
~By Annie Proulx ~
Miller didn't write Death of a Salesman. He released it. It was there inside him, waiting to be turned loose. That's the measure of its merit.
~By Elia Kazan ~
God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.
~By John Calvin ~
Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men.
~By Alexander Pope ~
The only conduct that merits the drastic remedy of impeachment is that which subverts our system of government or renders the president unfit or unable to govern.
~By Charles Ruff ~
I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.
~By Mikhail Bakunin ~
The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
~By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ~
The merit of a democratic regime rests on one's continual willingness to exchange views, and to compete on the basis of individual merit and capacities.
~By Jose Eduardo Dos Santos ~
An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.
~By Walter Savage Landor ~
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
~By William Shakespeare ~
Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.
~By Benjamin Disraeli ~
Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from proclaiming its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.
~By David Ogilvy ~
Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity.
~By Jean Henri Fabre ~
What is merit? The opinion one man entertains of another.
~By Henry John Temple ~
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
In masks outrageous and austere, The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.
~By Elinor Wylie ~
I have been a Professor Emeritus since 1958, and have continued my scientific studies.
~By Karl von Frisch ~
My primary lesson, however, was that I'm a solo writer, happiest when I'm making all the executive decisions. I've always been willing to rise or fall on my own merits.
~By Sue Grafton ~
Pride in boasting of family antiquity, makes duration stand for merit.
~By John Zimmerman ~
Some people displease with merit, and others' very faults and defects are pleasing.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
Merit, however inconsiderable, should be sought for and rewarded. Methods are the master of masters.
~By Charles Maurice de Talleyrand ~
Her great merit is finding out mine - there is nothing so amiable as discernment.
~By Lord Byron ~
What is deservedly suffered must be borne with calmness, but when the pain is unmerited, the grief is resistless.
~By Ovid ~
What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.
~By Piers Anthony ~
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
~By Jonathan Swift ~
Temerity is not always successful.
~By Titus Livius ~
Now an infinite happiness cannot be purchased by any price less than that which is infinite in value; and infinity of merit can only result from a nature that is infinitely divine or perfect.
~By Adam Clarke ~
Whence it is somewhat strange that any men from so mean and silly a practice should expect commendation, or that any should afford regard thereto; the which it is so far from meriting, that indeed contempt and abhorrence are due to it.
~By Isaac Barrow ~
The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
Security for agriculture merits serious concern by not only the agricultural community but our nation as a whole. The risk to the U.S. food supply and overall economy is real.
~By Pat Roberts ~
Jealousy would be far less torturous if we understood that love is a passion entirely unrelated to our merits.
~By Paul Eldridge ~
People actually get sponsors based on the merits of the Cup, not on the merits of the sailors.
~By John Sweeney ~
Australia as a nation, as a set of cities and some regional centres, that project died a death and we didn't get it up, but I still think there's merit in that.
~By Susan Oliver ~
The market system requires that people be committed and willing to work hard. Inherent with that is what I call a merit system, which I think gives people the greatest opportunity.
~By Lee R. Raymond ~
We're in such a volatile climate right now politically. I think they didn't want Assassins to not succeed due to popular opinion and politics, versus on its own merits. I can respect that.
~By Neil Patrick Harris ~
How vain, without the merit, is the name.
~By Homer ~
Well, just that there would be somebody in the office and the voters - it was more or less an understanding in the entire community, as long as that person was doing a good job on the merits, nobody was going to run against him.
~By Stephen Breyer ~
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
~By Emily Dickinson ~
Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
~By Brian Eno ~
I urge the enactment of a civil service law so explicit and so strong that no partisan official will dare evade it, basing all rewards, promotions and salaries solely on merit, on loyalty and industry in the public service.
~By Arthur Capper ~
And for yourself, whatever there has been either of sin or duty, remember the one and forget the other, and betake yourself wholly to the mercy of God and the merit of Christ.
~By Donald Cargill ~
I no longer have the terrible nightmares that I used to have. Mao had just died in 1976, and China began to open up. For the first time scholarships to go to the West to study were awarded on academic merit.
~By Jung Chang ~
People that are conceited of their own merit take pride in being unfortunate, that themselves and others may think them considerable enough to be the envy and the mark of fortune.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.
~By Charles Caleb Colton ~
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
~By Igor Stravinsky ~
It is the merit of a general to impart good news, and to conceal the truth.
~By Sophocles ~
I further believe that all must be saved through the merits of Christ.
~By Daniel Morgan ~
The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.
~By Horatio Seymour ~
Cagey trial lawyers have figured out there's a pretty good likelihood their case - no matter what its merit - will literally get its day in court because of favorable judges.
~By Dennis Hastert ~
Those from whose pocket the salary is drawn, and by whose appointment the officer was made, have always a right to discuss the merits of their officers, and their modes of exercising the duties they are paid to perform.
~By Charles Babbage ~
The World, thinking itself affronted by superior merit, takes delight to bring it down to its own level.
~By Samuel Richardson ~
None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.
~By Torquato Tasso ~
Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.
~By Coco Chanel ~
I believe that President Clinton considered the legal merits of the arguments for the pardon as he understood them, and he rendered his judgment, wise or unwise, on the merits.
~By John Podesta ~
In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.
~By Christian Nestell Bovee ~
In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.
~By Paul Gauguin ~
An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.
~By Robert Bork ~
True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.
~By Edward F. Halifax ~
It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.
~By Petrarch ~
It wasn't glamorous in my day. In the regions, reporters were seen as such low life that they didn't merit their name in the Radio Times. Now people are interested in being famous. I never gave it a thought.
~By Kate Adie ~
With children no longer the universally accepted reason for marriage, marriages are going to have to exist on their own merits.
~By Eleanor Holmes Norton ~
The sufficiency of merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient.
~By Francis Quarles ~
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
~By George Santayana ~
Yes, young men, Italy owes to you an undertaking which has merited the applause of the universe. You have conquered and you will conquer still, because you are prepared for the tactics that decide the fate of battles.
~By Giuseppe Garibaldi ~
On their own merits modest men are dumb.
~By George Colman ~
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
~By Alexander Pope ~
Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.
~By Eleanor Roosevelt ~
It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.
~By Horace ~
I don't say tis impossible for an impudent man not to rise in the world, but a moderate merit with a large share of impudence is more probable to be advanced than the greatest qualifications without it.
~By Mary Wortley ~
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
~By Ruth Benedict ~
We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extremes, and by asserting our independence, become of sufficient consequence in their eyes to merit a closer study than they have hitherto accorded us.
~By Henry Lawson ~
The very gradual reductions in my weight which I am able to show, may be interesting to many, and I have great pleasure in stating them, believing that they serve to demonstrate further the merit of the system pursued.
~By William Banting ~
We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.
~By W. Somerset Maugham ~
The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another.
~By John Austin ~
Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
~By Francis Bacon ~
Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.
~By Benjamin Disraeli ~
There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.
~By Douglas Hurd ~
In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
~By Thorstein Veblen ~
I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.
~By Harold Brodkey ~
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
~By Edgar Allan Poe ~
The sacrifices made by veterans and their willingness to fight in defense of our nation merit our deep respect and praise - and to the best in benefits and medical care.
~By Sue Kelly ~
There's always merit to having a debate.
~By Ward Churchill ~
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