"Man in the street" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opportunity to take Canada," said the man in the street. In fact, it was utterly incomprehensible to the average German that we should not indulge in some neighbouring land-grabbing while Britain was so busy with ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... Rome. He did not want to be a "dictator." He would be entirely satisfied with the title of "the Honourable." But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed him as Augustus—the Illustrious—he did not object and a few years later the man in the street called him Caesar, or Kaiser, while the soldiers, accustomed to regard Octavian as their Commander-in-chief referred to him as the Chief, the Imperator or Emperor. The Republic had become an Empire, but the average Roman was hardly aware of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... This, the ordinary man in the street view, is that as Ireland would be as much a part and belonging to Great Britain after a war as before it, whatever the termination of that war might be, she could not fail to share the losses defeat must bring to a common realm. The partnership ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... question of method. The voter's duty is to take care that the Government consists of men whom he can trust to devize or support institutions making for the common welfare. This is highly skilled work; and to be governed by people who set about it as the man in the street would set about it is to make straight for "red ruin and the breaking up of laws." Voltaire said that Mr Everybody is wiser than anybody; and whether he is or not, it is his will that must prevail; but the will and the way are two very different things. For example, it is ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... books he printed were important: Villemain's Miscellanies, Merimee's Jacquerie, Madame Roland's Memoirs, not to speak of his own small Critical and Anecdotal Dictionary of Paris Signboards, published under a pseudonym, or rather anonymously, since it was signed Le Batteur de Pave, the "Man in the Street." But the senior partner, he who should have financed the concern with all the more wariness as d'Assonvillez, the principal supplier of capital, had a mortgage upon the whole estate, allowed himself to be paid for his printing, more often than not, in bills ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... exclude the question, 'Did this or that occurrence, which is presented as an event in the physical order, actually happen, or not?' The question has a very definite meaning for the man of science, as it has for the man in the street. To call ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Lady Sophia, after his supposed death, had imparted to relatives the fact of his engagement, and the unscrupulous scoundrel, Mr. Oxford, had got hold of her and was forcing her to give evidence for him. And after the evidence, the joke of every man in the street would be to the effect that Priam Farll, rather than marry the skinny spinster, had pretended ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Even allowing that Russia should obtain a concession of this place—a most unlikely thing to be asked for or conceded while Persia remains an independent country—matters would not be as simple for Russia as the man in the street takes them to be. ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... tradition Adam was certainly the name of the natural man as created in the garden of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had described as typically British Frankenstein's monster, and called him Smith, and somebody, on demanding what about the man in the street, had been told "Smith is the man in the street." The thing happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of these Adams and Smiths and men in the street and average sensual men and economic men and womanly women and what ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... pass; 'tis a detail. The main thing is this: they forget that most of us are narrowly tied and circumscribed at present by endless monopolies and endless restrictions of land or capital. I should like to buy pictures; but I can't afford them. I long to see Japan; but I shall never get there. The man in the street may desire to till the ground: every acre is appropriated. He may wish to dig coal: Lord Masham prevents him. He may have a pretty taste in Venetian glass: the flints on the shore are private property; the furnace and the implements belong to a capitalist. Under the existing ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... beautiful, more worth the effort of a lifetime than ever before. Here was a woman of mind and heart, one not bounded by narrow sectionalism, but seeing the good wherever it might be. He felt that he had behaved like a prig and a fool. Why should he be influenced by the idle words of some idle man in the street? He was not Lucia Catherwood's guardian; if there were any question of guardianship, she was much better fitted to be ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... heavily on her foot, the man in the street car made humble apology to the woman. She listened in grim silence, and, when he had made an end, spoke very much to ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Main Street. It was quiet and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy—the tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said: ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... that it would illuminate the prosaic surroundings with brilliant flashes if it could become visible. On the morning of the sale samples of the cacaos are on exhibit at the principal brokers. The man in the street brought into the broker's office would ask what these strange beans might be. "A new kind of almond?" he might ask. And then, on being told they were cacao, he would see nothing to choose between all the various lots ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... about the only man in the Street, sir," declared young Bristoll one morning, in a burst of admiration, as he and his chief sat together over their coffee, "to whom J.J. Malone seems willing to grant an ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of the man in the street is the idea that the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were contemporaries of Christ; and that the Gospels were written and circulated during ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... in the street when he speaks—that man in the street who reflects public opinion whether it is just or unjust, genuine or sophisticated. Listen to him when he speaks and ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... Cloudcuckootown? And the plain is where we ordinarily live and move; it has its rights, and is worth understanding for its own sake. Therefore we shall mix our mind with that of "Half-Rome" and "The Other Half-Rome" before we climb any mounts of transfiguration or enter any city set upon a hill. The "man in the street" is a veritable person, and it is good that we should make his acquaintance; even the man in the salon may speak his mind if he will; such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us better to appreciate the upheaval ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... travelling consists less in the sight of museums, cathedrals, picture galleries and landscapes, than in the study of the native man in the street and his peculiar ways. When abroad, "I am content to note my little facts," and so is Mr. GEO. A. BIRMINGHAM; in fact, it was he who first thought of mentioning the matter. The reverend canon tours in the U.S.A., which is, when you come to think of it, about the only safe area for the purpose ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... space to argue with Sir Laurence Gomme upon his main point, its continuity of policy and purpose from the Roman Empire till to-day, shown by the records of London's past. I leave it to the scholar and antiquary. It is my purpose to persuade the man in the street, to whom the names of Palgrave, Freeman and Stubbs are not household words, to buy a copy of London (Williams and Norgate) for inclusion in his permanent library. If I should insist upon his reading it then and there he would reply, as one ignorant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... have been helping to run the gas works of a certain Corporation during a strike. While commending this action, we admit that we can conceive of nothing more likely to undermine the resolute patriotism of the man in the street than a gas bill furnished ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... of high family, was very poor, and men said it was by the fault of his cousin Kallias, the "Enriched by the Well;" and Themistocles contrived to turn people's minds against him, so as to have him ostracised. One day he met a man in the street, with a shell in his hand, who asked him to write the name of Aristides on it, as he could not write himself. "Pray," said Aristides, "what harm has this person done you, that you ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... famous Essex fictionist was a meritorious and ingenious work, but he found it far from exhaustive. The idea of God, he held, still needed handling in a capable efficient way. What was wrong with religion was, he said, its mystery; if only it could be pruned of nonsense and made practical for the man in the street, it might become really useful. He personally had not yet thought finally on the subject of God, having just now more tasks on hand (including a new play and universal supervision) than he could count on the Five Fingers, but directly he had time he meant to attend to the matter and polish it off. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... to 585 Boylston Street in a business building, and local societies were kept in touch. Every effort was made to reach labor unions and other organizations of men with speakers and educational propaganda and to carry information to the man in the street, who often had never heard of the Woman Suffrage Association. The executive board met every two weeks and later every week or oftener. Mrs. Page, its chairman, was followed in 1911 by Mrs. Marion Booth Kelley; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... of opportunity for reflection was with us again, and since so little occasion for action presented itself we talked about war in peace. The man in the street—omniscient being!—discussed it threadbare on the pavement. A man who knew the Boers was the man in the street. He knew the British army, too, though; and was sanguine of its ability to go one better—the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... and close friends, Taine, Edmond About and Th. Gautier, might be on his side; perhaps, with reservations, Rossini and a few other eminent associates also. But the prescient, unerring verdict of the collective "man in the street"— ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... together as one united party. Take, for instance, the diatribe of Mr. W.S. Lilly on "The Price of Party Government" in the Fortnightly Review for June, 1900. Mr. Lilly complains bitterly that the infallible oracle in politics to-day is "the man in the street." He asserts that all issues are settled "by counting heads, in entire disregard of what the heads contain." His bugbear is the extension of the franchise. "Representative institutions, for example," he asks, "what do they represent? ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... become intolerable. However great the actual evils of the situation might be, public opinion held that it would be wiser to leave them to be dealt with by state authority than by such incompetent statesmanship as had been common in Washington. Moreover, the man in the street resented the indifference of politicians to all issues save those derived from the ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... mother, thank you. Funny thing; met a man in the street, hadn't seen for five years. Saw him last in Rio—Funny thing. Well, we lunched together. Not a bad fellow—Seen a thing or ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... sparkling, her color so brilliant as at this moment when she asked her husband to let her use her title. Hers was the beauty that blooms not for one man alone, but for the multitude; that feeds not on the love of one, but on the admiration of many. The murmur of the man in the street who turned and stared into her carriage was more than the devotion ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... day—the same old grievances always came round: the inferior political position of the Uitlanders, the primitive, not to say dirty and slovenly, habits of many Boer farmers, and their lack of energy. These are the grievances of the man in the street, and they appear grave enough—when once one has invested oneself with the right of censorship. Then the rebels—wretched, unsuccessful farmers, who found themselves misled and their ideas of duty confounded—these ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... They always told me a republic was in the air—young talents and energy must come to the front—the people must have a voice in the government. I think the average Frenchman is intelligent, but I don't think the vote of the man in the street can have as much value as that of a man who has had not only a good education but who has been accustomed always to hear certain principles of law and order held up as rules for the guidance of his own life as well as other people's. ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... that the Man in the Street is a better judge of literature than the Critic—the man who knows little than the man who knows more—wears (to my mind, at least) a slightly imbecile air on the face of it. It also appears to me that people are either confusing thought or misusing language ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be Pope in 1903; but the hint that the Archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, might be made Cardinal because the American President respected him, could not be tolerated. The President's letters beginning "Dear Maria" went gayly through the newspapers of the world, and the man in the street everywhere wondered how Roosevelt could have been so indiscreet as to have trusted so imprudent a zealot. "Dear Maria" and her husband were recalled from their Embassy and put out of reach of committing ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... an account of the so-called "private international law" which surely needs revision for the benefit of any "man in the street" who may care to hear about it. X.Y.[1] defines it as "that part of the law of each separate country, as administered in its own Courts, which deals with international matters," and he enumerates as such matters "prize, ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... later Harte stumbled upon the man in the street. He was most comfortably drunk, and pleasant and chatty. Harte remarked upon the splendidly and movingly dramatic incident of the ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... reservations, have retained their popularity, and so, when it was settled that the English army in its dire peril was delivered by angelic aid, the way was clear for general belief, and for the enthusiasms of the religion of the man in the street. And so soon as the legend got the title "The Angels of Mons" it became impossible to avoid it. It permeated the Press: it would not be neglected; it appeared in the most unlikely quarters—in Truth and Town Topics, The New Church Weekly (Swedenborgian) and John Bull. ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... the official outlook, but this country, during the last ten years, has gone through great vicissitudes. Besides, it is not only the official outlook in which Paul is interested. He doesn't understand, and frankly I don't, the position of what they call over here 'the man in the street.' You see, he must be either a fool, or ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for a Frenchman; it don't pay in England." So then I maintained that half the political reputations of the present day were based on escapades. "Whom do you mean?"—he said—"Randolph Churchill?—But Randolph's escapades were always just what the man in the street understood. As for your escapade, the man in the street can't make head or tail of ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Not till a day or two later, when the remnants of strained pre-occupation with the big things of war have been charmed away by old haunts and old friends, do you feel wholly at home amid your rediscovered fellow-citizens, the Man in the Street, the Pacifist, the air-raid-funk Hysteric, the Lady Flag-Seller, the War Profiteer, the dear-boy Fluff Girl, the Prohibitionist, the England-for-the-Irish politician, the Conscientious Objector, the hotel-government ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... the State has laid down certain rules by means of which the men who formed it could serve it better, and these are our laws which we obey not for our own good directly, but for the good of the State. From the point of view of the plain man in the street, it is all utterly illogical, for it would be logical to go and take from your neighbour whatever you wished, so long as you were strong enough to hold it. But, let us thank Heaven, no sane man is logical, and only a Professor would ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... doggedly, "Remember, we attempted to find the average man, the common man, the little man, the man in the street. Well, it becomes obvious to me that we did ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)
... requested his friend to stand outside and count as he went in and threw them out. Soon a battered man was thrown out the door far into the street. The friend began his count and shouted, 'One!' But the man in the street staggered to his feet and angrily screamed, 'Stop counting! It's me!' When this feast opened I was proudly expecting to make a speech, but the great men who have preceded me have done all and more than I intended to do. The hour is spent—they ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... nature which must always seek its own happiness, yet is slowly finding that that happiness depends on the happiness of all. The lives of daily crucifixion without hope of reward are abundant all about you—you all know them. And if once you exploit these actual sublimities of human nature—of the man in the street—no tale of devotion in Holy Writ will ever again move you as these do. And when you have preached this long enough, then will take place in human society, naturally, spontaneously, that great thing which big men have dreamed of doing with their artificial devices of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... prisoners that came into his hands what British sternness meant. In due course twenty wounded Prussians came in. He was discovered next day actually distributing cigarettes to them. Now we must recollect that the British Tommy is not a class apart; he is simply the 'man in the street,' the people. Sometimes there is savage bitterness, not without good reason, and frequently the sullen or frightened temper of the prisoners made friendliness difficult, but Tommy—and by that name I mean the British citizen under arms—does not long nourish grudges ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... ruin that mantilla, for thou wilt not get another. Thou art going to Blandina's, no? Be sure thou goest no farther! I would not let thee go there alone were it not so near. And be sure thou speakest to no man in the street." ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... stoicism, good faith, and confidence in those above him; helpless by reason of his snobbery, mutual distrust, carelessness for the morrow, and lack of public spirit-in the face of War how impotent and to be pitied is the man in the street!" That paper, though clever, always seemed to him ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is doing us good. It is giving us the beginnings of political education in a department that has been utterly neglected. It may be worth while to review the whole situation of to-day, and to ask how the man in the street can ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... still frequently called, drives through the workmen's quarter of Amsterdam, the 'Jordaan' (a corruption of the French jardin), the bunting is plentiful, the cheering and singing are more so, and the general enthusiasm surpasses both. The 'man in the street,' that remarkable political genius of the present age, has scarcely ever wavered in his simple affection for his Prince and Princess of Orange; and though this affection is personal, not political—for ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... all that," Southey returned. "Fortunately for him the doctor could account for every hour of his time. Of course, the man in the street was suspicious of him—is still, perhaps, to some extent, but it hasn't prevented his getting on. He married Ruth Lester, and I hear is ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... their pleasure to leave untouched. This bit of mischief, and a few others of the same stamp, would sometimes bring a smile on the face of the younger of Guillaume's daughters, the pretty maiden who has just now appeared to the bewitched man in the street. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... people. Everybody knew the facts, and in case any authors distorted them, the public records were open for any one to consult. After that time, however, the rulers commonly kept their acts and discussions secret; and their censored accounts, when made public, were naturally looked upon by the man in the street with doubt and suspicion. Hence, from this point, says the historian, a radical difference must inevitably be found in ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... your associates, and keep out of suspicious company. Vienna is full of spies watching escaped Polish refugees. Your name'—reading it carefully—'is apt to excite remark. We are powerless to help in these cases. Only last week an American who befriended a man in the street was arrested on the charge of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and, despite our efforts, is ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... this criticism does not imply the faintest want of respect for Lord Roberts, his qualities and his services. He has ventured into the field of foreign politics and prophecy. A public man of great eminence, he has expressed an English view of German "intentions." For the man in the street (I write in that capacity) to receive that expression in silence is to endorse it, to make it national. And I have stated here the reasons which make such an attitude disastrous. We all greatly respect Lord Roberts, but, even before that, must come ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... convenient fiction, the Man in the Street, what sort of plant a cactus is, he will probably tell you it is all leaf and no stem, and each of the leaves grows out of the last one. Whenever we set up the Man in the Street, however, you must have noticed we ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... system, the public imagination goes steadily on with its own curious picture of how that system lived and moved and had its being. A prolix tale of origins would be out of place in this chronicle; but even the mind of the man in the street ought to be set right as regards what feudalism was designed to do, and what in fact it did, for mankind, while civilization battled its ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... sense artificial, since it cannot become important or practical unless a certain environment gives play to individual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction nevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does the man in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he had been born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him as he is, but only as he might have been, if per impossibile he had not been himself. There is a strange metaphysical ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... these others, the larger half of the army. But there is a romance and a glow about the "Anzac" exploits that (rail at the injustice of it as you may) makes a human-interest story that will elbow out of the mind of the "man in the street" what other troops did. In fact, every second man one meets has the idea that the Australians and New Zealanders were the ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the aim of this book? It is to give the intelligent student-citizen, otherwise called "the man in the street," a bunch of intellectual keys by which to open doors which have been hitherto shut to him, partly because he got no glimpse of the treasures behind the doors, and partly because the portals were made forbidding by an unnecessary display of technicalities. Laying aside conventional modes of treatment ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... a vague tendency voiced by some critics to advance the theory that the real future democracy of art depends on the verdict of the man in the street. This is ridiculous. The future of art depends on no one class of men, aristocratic or democratic. It depends on all men. Art is neither democratic nor aristocratic. It knows no class - it is concerned with life at large - elemental ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... did he mean by this?" began Julia, "'Let Potentates fear! Let Dives tremble! The horny hand of the poor Man in the Street is stretched forth to grasp ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... operations. While aloft the observer does not trust to his memory or his eye picture, but commits the essential factors to paper in the form of a code, or what may perhaps be described more accurately as a shorthand pictorial interpretation of the things he has witnessed. To the man in the street such a record would be unintelligible, but it is pregnant with meaning, and when worked out for the guidance of the superior officers is ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... discovered, however she might plead that she knew nothing of its contents, a motive for the death of Ballantyne might be inferred from it. It would be a false motive, but just the sort of motive which the man in the street would immediately accept. Thresk burnt the letter carefully in a plate and pounded up each black flake of paper until nothing was left but ashes. Then for the moment his work was done. He had only to ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... Tertius. "Murder! I heard a man in the street voice the same opinion just now. Of course! It's the only opinion. Yet in the newspaper they're asking which it was. But I suppose the ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... any word of what you have said," he declared, "except that yours is simply the superficial and obvious idea of the man in the street as to the course of the next probable war. Now let us go a little further. I grant all the points which you urge in favour of your suggested triple alliance. I will even admit that your forecast of a war taking place ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... serious thoughts of at once striking his tent. One of his letters was filled with the conflicting doubts in which they lived for nigh a fortnight, every day's arrival contradicting the arrival of the day before: so that, as he told me, you met a man in the street to-day, who told you there would certainly be war in a week; and you met the same man in the street to-morrow, and he swore he always knew there would be nothing but peace; and you met him again the day after, and he said it all depended now on something perfectly new and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... one may ask: Why does the great and universal fame of classical authors continue? The answer is that the fame of classical authors is entirely independent of the majority. Do you suppose that if the fame of Shakespeare depended on the man in the street it would survive a fortnight? The fame of classical authors is originally made, and it is maintained, by a passionate few. Even when a first-class author has enjoyed immense success during his lifetime, the majority have never ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... cried, "because he run away! And left an old man in the street—dead, for all he knowed—nor cared neither. Yah!" shrieked the Tammany heeler. "HIM ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... political methods. Instead of private meetings where suffrage was discussed before a select audience of the already convinced, the women began to mount soap boxes on street corners and to talk suffrage to the man in the street. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... Herr Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the desert of ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... by an Italian man in the street, almost under the elevated station, and, as Flossie leaned over the stair railing to look ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope
... to be proved. It was said, and is believed by the author, (and such as doubt it he does not address) that all good men are more or less poetical in some way or other; while their poetry shows itself at various times. Thus the business-man in the street has other to think of than poetry; but when he is inclined to look at a picture, or in his more poetical humour, will he neglect the pictorial counterpart of what he neglected before? To test this, show him a camera obscura, where there is a more literal ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... success. He 'voices,' as he would say himself, the opinion of the average man on every subject. He might be a leader-writer on the Mail or Times. What do you know of the average man or of his opinions? But the man in the street, as he is called to-day, can only learn from the man who is just one step above himself, and so the George Curzons come to success in life. That, too, is the secret of the popularity of this or that writer. Hall Caine is an even larger George ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... poor, and if the Lord were to give us grace to live more as this dear man of God did, we might draw much more than we have as yet done out of our heavenly Father's bank, for our poor brethren and sisters. March 2. A man in the street ran up to brother Craik and put a paper containing ten shillings into his hand, saying, "That is for you and Mr. Mueller," and went hastily away. May 28. This morning, whilst sitting in my room, the distress of several brethren and sisters was ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... operations and the extended front on which they were carried out, any newspaper correspondent present could hope to chronicle only a sub-section of the action. The public, therefore, was without any complete record of what happened.[11] To the man in the street the British general and his forces seemed to spend three months in perpetual dodging in and about some thirty square miles of ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... bought up all the theatres, and he said he'd make them pay. And his cousin, the Man in the Street, took shares. And they organised the Theatre. And they made it efficient. And they conducted it on sound commercial lines. And the magic vanished and people wondered where and why. Now what we're going to show you, you won't believe could ever happen at all. It does ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... man in the tower the world below him is likely to look very small. Men look like ants and all the bustle and stir of their hurrying lives seems pitifully confused and aimless. But the man in the street who is looking and striving upward is in a different situation. However poor his present plight, the thing he aims at and is striving toward stands out clear and distinct above him, inspiring him with hope and ambition in his struggle ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... interested, though plainly skeptical. A short, fat man, who was standing near the saloon door, looked on with a half-sneer. Several others were smiling blandly. A tall man on the extreme edge of the crowd, near the rider, was watching the man in the street gravely. Other men had allowed various expressions to creep into their faces. But ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... territory or to their plans for larger navies. Her Palmerstons and Disraelis had boasted of the might of the empire on which the sun never set; her Froudes and Seeleys were singing the glories of the 'expansion of England'; the man in the street felt the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon to rule the 'lesser breeds'; while the American Mahan had made clear the importance of sea-power and had pointed the means to the end so glorified. None the less the rivalry was felt ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... man in the street when he speaks—that man in the street who reflects public opinion whether it is just or unjust, genuine or sophisticated. Listen to him when he speaks and you will hear ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... of the darkness. "I beg your pardon, madam," he said. "I met this young man in the street, and he asked me to come here and see a playmate of his who is, I understand, an invalid. But if ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... science, again, the conception of the plurality and interaction of causes has become part of our habitual mental furniture; but in politics both the book-learned student and the man in the street may be heard to talk as if each result had only one cause. If the question, for instance, of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is raised, any two politicians, whether they are tramps on the outskirts of a Hyde Park crowd or Heads of Colleges writing to the Times, are not unlikely ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... breakfast her mother culled from her capacious memory a list of kindnesses of which she had been the recipient or the witness. Mary supplemented the recital by incidents from her own observation. She had often seen a man in the street give a penny to an old woman. She had often seen old women give things to other old women. She knew many people who never looked for the halfpenny change from a newsboy. Mrs. Makebelieve applauded the justice of such transactions; they ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the general public and appeals mainly to musicians. But the greatest men do not go over the heads of the masses, they take them rather by the hand. The true musician would not snub so much as a musical critic. His instinct is towards the man in the street rather than the Academy. Perhaps I say this as being myself a man in the street musically. I do not know, but I know that Bach does not appeal to me and that I do appeal from Bach to the man in the street and not to the Academy, because I believe the first of these to ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... loans hitherto issued in war time were floated as a basis of national currency and were taken up by the banks in large amounts. But the Liberty loan was an appeal to the million—to several millions; to the man in the street, the small tradesman, the salaried class. Workers realized that in subscribing to the loan they were not only securing an absolutely safe investment, but were providing funds for wages and profits. The money they invested as ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... not have taken as seriously as Emily did the least accidental exchange of courtesies with the eligible male. If the two girls, wasting a morning in the shops in town, happened to meet some hurrying young man in the street, the color rushed into Emily's face, and she alluded to the incident a dozen times during the course of the day. Like most girls, she had a special manner for men, a rather audacious and attractive manner, Susan thought. The conversation was never anything but gay and frivolous and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... themselves, and at which they both collaborated. Morten had no respect for the existing laws and little for the new. He did not play a very zealous part in the work of party organization, and was rather held at arm's length by the leaders. But his relations with the man in the street were of the closest. He worked independently; there was scarcely his match in individual cases of need or injustice; and he was always laboring to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... surprise, Ronny found that Ross Metaxa's small section of the Bureau of Investigation seemed almost as great a secret within the Bureau as it was to the man in the street. At one period, Ronny wondered if it were possible that this was a department which had been lost in the wilderness of boondoggling that goes on in any great bureaucracy. Had Section G been set up a century or so ago and then forgotten ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... they are replaced by something newer and more up-to-date, displaying nothing of the systems of patiently constructed knowledge out of which, almost as a casual incident, have come the practically useful results which interest the man in the street. The increased command over the forces of nature which is derived from science is undoubtedly an amply sufficient reason for encouraging scientific research, but this reason has been so often urged and is so easily appreciated that other reasons, to my mind quite as important, are ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... is passing to-day through a period of peculiar stress is to utter a commonplace so threadbare that one apologises for repeating it. Even the man in the street—or perhaps we ought to say even the man in the pew, the average member of a Christian Church—is aware that certain potent forces have been for some time past directing a series of sustained assaults upon what were until recently all but unquestioned beliefs; nor, if he is capable of appreciating ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... public fuss having arisen about this particular difficulty, the whole matter was gradually and quietly disposed of. As Father Hull says, "the new view gradually filtered down from learned circles to the man in the street, so that nowadays the partiality of the Deluge is a matter of commonplace knowledge among all educated Christians, and is even taught to the rising generation in ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... was omnipresent. Suppose that Shakespeare was a clever man, a lover of reading, a rapid reader with an excellent memory, easily influenced, like Burns, by what he read, and I really think that my conjectures are not too audacious. Not only "the man in the street," but "the reading public" (so loved by Coleridge), have not the beginning of a guess as to the way in which a quick man reads. Watch them poring for hours over a newspaper! Let me quote what Sir Walter ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... The only uncertain link in the chain was: Would Mrs. Drabdump rush across to get me to break open the door? Women always rush for a man. I was well-nigh the nearest, and certainly the most authoritative man in the street, and I took it for granted ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... other world of his occupations and thoughts, these insects, like daily cark and care, did not seem one whit to annoy him. It was a goodly sight to see this serene, cool and ripe old philosopher, who by sharp inquisition of man in the street, and then long meditating upon him, surrounded by all those queer old implements, charts and books, had grown at last so wondrous wise. There he sat, quite motionless among those restless flies; and, with a sound like ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... but the knowledge of the man in the street in these things, though once or twice I have chanced on prophecy, and I am uneasily apprehensive of the quality of all our naval preparations. We go on launching these lumping great Dreadnoughts, and I cannot bring myself to believe in ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... does; sometimes not. I remember a case in my student days where an epileptic violently assaulted a man in the street—almost murdered him in fact—then assaulted a man who tried to detain him, ran away, and remembered ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... public should know something more than at present both of the historic development of the "civic" idea, and of the psychology of aggregations as differentiated from the psychology of the individual. Not until we can make "the man in the street" a conscious citizen, instead of a political automaton, shall we be able to enlist his sympathies with "Civics"; and without those sympathies the sociologist's "Civics" will, I fear, be but ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... on the right side of him, Charles; but don't ask me to do so, for I hate mean folks. If I should meet that man in the street to-night, I ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken. Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... in the bulkheads. Not that I hadn't had time to get used to the treatment; every man in my corps gets a full dose of awe and respect from the services, from Government officials and even from the United Cabinets. The only reason we don't get it from the man in the street is that the man in the street—unless he happens to be a very special man in a very unusual street—doesn't know the corps exists. Which is a definite relief, by the way; at least, off the job, I'm no more ...
— The Man Who Played to Lose • Laurence Mark Janifer
... a man in the street you were anxious to speak to, and you jumped from a cab to catch him, and lost sight ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... man in the street and every soul in the hotel to know your private affairs?" demands Bingo. "If so, go on shoutin'. As to your bein' a widower, the chances are on the other side.... Gueldersdorp ain't exactly what you would call a healthy place just now. And as to divorcin' ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... until he was within arm's length of the other man in the street. "You're Fectnor, ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... required. However, the Home authorities chose to send out their help in driblets, and the same Home authorities were supposed to know how the driblets might be adequately disposed. It was only to the ignorant "man in the street" that the problem of how to meet the massed armies of the Boers with diffused handfuls ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... before these happenings I was over in Tunbridge Wells, and I got a glimpse of a man in the street. It was only a glimpse; but I have a quick eye for these things, and I never doubted who it was. It was the worst enemy I had among them all—one who has been after me like a hungry wolf after a caribou all these years. I knew there was trouble ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... finding the concluding line of play. Indeed, it might almost be said that then it is difficult for the British general not to catch the enemy. It is a question of what in chess we call the "opposition," and the visit by the Britisher to town 1 "gives him the jump" on the enemy, as the man in the street would say. ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... attributable to the interest which the people as a whole have traditionally taken in naval policy; in other words, to the fact that we are a seafaring nation. Similarly air supremacy can only be secured if the air-sense of the man in the street is fostered, and aviation is not confined to military operations, but becomes a part of everyday life. At the present time commercial aviation is far too small to play the part of reservoir to the Royal Air Force—an object which ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... official person who registers formal opinions when called upon to do so. The latter corresponds to the "intellectual," and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling classes; whilst the former—the instinctive, the spontaneous, the common-sense element—dominates the man in the street. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... that he was to hold the Strait of Korea at all costs. Yet, such is human inconsistency, notwithstanding the above stringent order, which bound the unfortunate admiral hand and foot, and effectually precluded his pursuit of the raiding ships, he was so severely blamed by "the man in the street" for the damage done that a mob actually attacked and wrecked his house! This, of course, was most unjust and cruel treatment of a thoroughly capable and zealous man who, hampered though he was, did all he could to bring the raiders to book, and indeed, but for a sudden change ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... beat Germany," Horlock ruminated, "the man in the street thought that we had ensured the peace of the world. Who could have dreamed that a nation who had played such an heroic part, which had imperiled its very existence for the sake of a principle, was all the time ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... considering steps to bring the personalities of Cabinet Ministers more prominently into the public eye. "We are not sufficiently known," said Sir WILLIAM SUTHERLAND, who has the matter in hand, "as living palpitating figures to the man in the street. We do not grip the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... their aesthetic tastes and refined ears, so they are eliminating them from their vocabulary and replacing them with mongrels of foreign birth and hybrids of unknown origin. For the ordinary people, however, the man in the street or in the field, the woman in the kitchen or in the factory, they are still tried and true and, like old friends, should be cherished and preferred to all strangers, no matter from what source the latter ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... at me, and missed, a fraction of a second before Narayan Singh landed on him with hands and feet; whereat the man in the street emptied his pistol at me and ran away. I was in two minds whether to give chase to him, but made the wrong decision, being heavy on my feet and none too fond of running, so the big fish ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... Even in these days when kings are two a penny, and there is a never-ending procession of Napoleons and Nelsons to the Guildhall to receive swords and freedoms and honorary degrees, the arrival of a Shah of Persia stirs the imagination of the man in the street. He feels something of the old thrill. But in the nineties, of course, we talked about nothing else for weeks. "Have you seen the Shah?" was the popular catch-phrase of the day; there were music hall songs about him; he was almost as ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... not caused him to lose his oratorical form. His gestures are slightly reminiscent of the action of the common pump-handle, but his voice is excellent, and his matter has the merit of exactly resembling what our old friend "the Man in the Street" would say in less Parliamentary language, He has no hesitations, for example, on the subject of making Germany pay. By one of those rapid financial calculations for which he is renowned he has arrived at the comfortable figure of ten thousand millions ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... where he was wont to lounge. K. a good safe man; one of the rare kind whose reputation stands highest with the innermost circle of those who work and live with him. To the outside world, the man in the street, KIMBERLEY is an expression; some not quite sure whether he isn't a territory in South Africa. Known in the Lords, of course; listened to with respect, much as HALLAM'S Constitutional History of England is occasionally read. But when to-night he rises ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... which it was too late to break—at least this was not the time to break it with money becoming unbelievably scarcer every day and a great railroad man talking angrily, and another great railroad man preaching caution at a time when the caution of the man in the Street might mean something so serious to Dysart that he didn't ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, a costly book, have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 20, he appeared, for the only time I suppose in his life, as a witness in a Court of Justice, being called to give evidence to the character of Mr. Baretti, who having stabbed a man in the street, was arraigned at the Old Bailey for murder[294]. Never did such a constellation of genius enlighten the aweful Sessions-House, emphatically called JUSTICE HALL; Mr. Burke, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Beauclerk, and Dr. Johnson; and undoubtedly their favourable testimony had due weight with the Court ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... of party regularity as the supreme test in public affairs has passed away from the public mind. It is a great deliverance. The man in the street no longer asks about a measure or a policy merely whether it is good Republican or good Democratic doctrine. Now he asks whether it is honest, and means what it says, whether it will promote the public interest, weaken special privilege, and help to give every man a fair chance. If it will, ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... he left the city in a sort of panic, and traveled to a large town a hundred miles away. Here he succeeded in getting a good job; his spirits began to revive; he made some good acquaintances, and prospered beyond all expectation for nearly a year. One day he noticed a man in the street who stared hard at him; not long after he saw the same man standing in front of the house in which he lodged; the next morning his landlord came to him and, with some embarrassment, said that he would have to ask him ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne |
