My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge not a uniform you can't take off.

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

Men like me who merely wish to establish political freedom will in such circumstances lose all their influence and others will get influence who may become dangerous to all established interests whatsoever.

Widespread state control over art and culture has left no room for freedom of expression in the country. For more than 60 years anyone with a dissenting opinion has been suppressed. Chinese art is merely a product: it avoids any meaningful engagement. There is no larger context. Its only purpose is to charm viewers with its ambiguity.

Freedom is not won by merely overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or an oppressive regime. That is usually only the prelude to a new tyranny a new oppression.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart the excision of its memory.

For you who no longer posses it freedom is everything for us who do it is merely an illusion.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom when it comes not merely philosophically but almost with pleasure.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

Coercion after all merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food therefore if he eats meat he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.

We will be safer from terrorist attack only when we have earned the respect of all other nations instead of their fear respect for our values and not merely our weapons.

The universal human laws - need love for the beloved fear hunger periodic exaltation the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain - are constant predictable reliable universal and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base something guarded not merely from attack but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts the desert or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

I fear that in the end the famous debate among materialists idealists and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Being very famous is not the fun it sounds. It merely means you're being chased by a lot of people and you lose your privacy.

Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan conservatives have succeeded by adhering to a platform that rests firmly on three legs: smaller government faith and family and a strong national defense. These three legs do not merely represent a political coalition they are three necessary components of a strong and secure America.

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible.

Is it faith to understand nothing and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses ' we merely cease to shape our lives by it.