"Man in the street" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frozen to death in the retreat of "La Grande Armee" from Moscow. 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. Certainly universal ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... fact in a queer way the other night. There's a broker I've known down-town—fellow by the name of Relpin. Met him last summer. He does most of Shepler's business; he's supposed to be closer to Shepler and know more about the inside of his deals than any man in the Street. Well, I ran across Relpin down in the cafe the other night and he was wearing one of those gents' nobby three-button souses. Nothing would do but I should dine with him, so I did. It was the night you and the folks went to the opera with the Oldakers. Relpin was full of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... pleasure of 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... of condescension, and selecting with the greatest care only words that the man in the street could understand, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... sufficient to condemn him;—and then with him there was an adequate motive, and what Lord Cantrip regarded as "a possibility." It was not to be conceived that from mere rage Phineas Finn would lay a plot for murdering a man in the street. "It is on the cards, my lord," said the Major, "that he may have chosen to attack Mr. Bonteen without intending to murder him. The murder may afterwards have been ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... never been convicted of bribery, and this is enough to warrant it in appointing to any judicial office. It has been impressed by the magnificence or riches of some citizen, and this fits it for appointing an aedile. All these things are matters of fact about which the man in the street has better knowledge than the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... perceiving immediately that his wife was absent from her place by his side, and thinking that his son had renewed his efforts to gain admission, the latter did not make a motion to rise. In a few moments, however, the repeated strokes of the mace, to which was added the loud call of a man in the street below caused him to start up in bed. He then perceived that his wife was not by his side. With an exclamation, he sprang upon the floor, and throwing ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... No. 6 Marlboro Street, a residential section, 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 ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... your 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 ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... the laugh of a man in the street, and started as if he had been stung. It sounded like the mockery of a fiend. Was the laugh directed at him? He started, and ran to the window, with a feeling of anger, to see who it was that was triumphing over his misery. He looked up and down the street, but could ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... commonness is the secret of his 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
... that the man in the street seems always to forget, when he is abusing the Anarchists, or whatever party happens to be his BETE NOIRE for the moment, as the cause of some outrage just perpetrated. This indisputable fact is that ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... genius who coined it has hit on a happy and a graphic and an illuminating expression; that at one bound he rose triumphant above the limitations of the language and tremendously enriched the working vocabulary of the man in the street. Whereas an Englishman's idea of slinging slang is to scoop up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did him any harm and apply it in the place of some other word, to which the first word is not related, even by marriage. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... was called by and by to my wife, she not being well. So to her, and found her in great pain...... So by and by to my office again, and then abroad to look out a cradle to burn charcoal in at my office, and I found one to my mind in Newgate Market, and so meeting Hoby's man in the street, I spoke to him to serve it in to the office for the King. So home to dinner, and after talk with my wife, she in bed and pain all day, I to my office most of the evening, and then home to my wife. This day Mrs. Russell did give my wife ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... man his almighty pretensions, I think he was very modest," said MacIan. "It is we who are arrogant, who know we are only men. The ordinary man in the street is more of a monster than that poor fellow; for the man in the street treats himself as God Almighty when he knows he isn't. He expects the universe to turn round him, though he knows ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... witnessed a little comedy which would have gone far in wiping clean all trace of his uncle's disparaging remarks of the morning. He would have enjoyed, too, Parkins's amazement. As the Receiving Teller of the Exeter Bank reached the hall floor the President of the Clearing House—the most distinguished man in the Street and one to whom Breen kotowed with genuflections equalling those of Parkins—accompanied by his daughter and followed by the senior partner of Breen & Co., were making their way to the front door. The second man ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... smile upon the ladies in consequence. The Vicar had probably heard the Squire's prejudiced story direct, and from the Manor House and the Vicarage reports had percolated, as such reports will percolate, to the draper's assistants, and the man in the street, down and down to the truant ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 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
... comparatively ineffective speaker, and passed in social life for a reserved and difficult personality. His friends put no one else beside him; and his colleagues in the Cabinet were well aware that he represented the keystone in their arch. But the man in the street, whether of the aristocratic or plebeian sort, knew comparatively little about him. All of which, combined with the special knowledge of an inner circle, helped still more to concentrate public attention on the convictions, the temperament, and ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to be accused of evil motives and every imaginable crime. When it is all over, when one has time to think of all that one has missed, one feels that all one has done could have been done just as well by the next man in the street. That is the end of it. And against all that, you two have the world before you. You can be rich—very rich indeed. You can make an idyll of this love of yours. You can travel around the world in your own yacht, you can visit all strange countries, you can wander ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... could probably, with perseverance, be convinced that pale pills are worth a guinea a box for pink people, were anyone interested in enforcing such a harmless proposition: and I have no doubt that the Man in the Street has long since accepted the reiterated axiom that a poet should hold aloof from public affairs, having no more capacity than a child for understanding ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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
... realise how tremendous and far-reaching an association the Boy Scouts are. It will be news to the Man in the Street to learn that, with the possible exception of the Black Hand, the Scouts are perhaps the most carefully-organised ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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, ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... figure 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 ...
— 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
... 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 ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... is 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 ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... 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 equality ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... regularly. Evidently he enjoyed being elder, and liked the sense of authority, which he could only display by strictness. In the village council the peasants were afraid of him and obeyed him. It would sometimes happen that he would pounce on a drunken man in the street or near the tavern, tie his hands behind him, and put him in the lock-up. On one occasion he even put Granny in the lock-up because she went to the village council instead of Osip, and began swearing, and he kept her there for a whole day and night. He had never lived in a town or read a book, but ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... sink him into wretchedness & degradation forever while he lives. And yet some of you have the hardihood to say that you are free & happy! May God have mercy on your freedom and happiness! I met a colored man in the street a short time since, with a string of boots on his shoulder; we fell into conversation, and in course of which I said to him, what a miserable set of people we are! He asked why?—Said I, we are so subjected under the whites, that we cannot obtain the comforts of life, ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... ludicrous standpoint. In this very prosaic and materialistic age, when very few persons have profound beliefs on any subject, the spectacle of one of the sovereigns of the earth still claiming a divine origin is one that appeals to the ludicrous susceptibilities of that vague entity "the man in the street." It is not well, however, that people should criticise statements in royal proclamations or in royal assertions too seriously. Even in this country there are documents issued from time to time bearing the royal sign manual which every one regards as interesting but meaningless ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... 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 lend a ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... 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 upward. For the man who is down there is always something to ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... is useless to frame categories in such a way as to 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 it ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... a police-notice to the effect that every lash shall have a knot at the end of it. There can be no harm in drawing the attention of the mob to the fact that the classes above them work with their heads, for any kind of headwork is mortal anguish to the man in the street. A fellow who rides through the narrow alleys of a populous town with unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, and keeps on cracking a whip several yards long with all his might, deserves there and then to stand down and receive ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... accomplishment or in personal daring and endurance, outclass the doings of 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 ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... 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 the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... 'Princess Ida' was not appreciated at its true value and still awaits its revenge, but in 'The Mikado' (1885) the two collaborators scored the greatest success of their career. The freshness and novelty of its surroundings—Japan had not then, so to speak, become the property of the man in the street—counted for something in the triumph of 'The Mikado,' but it is unquestionably one of the very best of the series. Mr. Gilbert never wrote wittier or more brilliant dialogue, and Sullivan never dazzled his ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... 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 ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... more than a pious wish to eliminate criminality and drunkenness in a systematic manner, but even the popular belief in ruthless suppression whenever there is "madness in the family" will not stand an intelligent scrutiny. The man in the street thinks madness is a fixed and definite thing, as distinct from sanity as black is from white. He is always exasperated at the hesitation of doctors when in a judicial capacity he demands: "Is this man mad ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... feudal 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 ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... it with the others, so I had to show that my accusation was covered by the law against extortion by comparing it with other laws as well as by proving it from the law itself. Such a subject, though far from having any charm for the ears of the man in the street, ought to be as interesting to the learned as it is uninteresting to the unlearned. But if I make up my mind to recite the speech, I shall invite all the learned people to hear it. However, please think it over by all means and tell me whether you still consider that I ought to ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... his 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 by those who had originally thought there was a need ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... otherwise, have voted at all. But this was not all; many women kept themselves in the vicinity of the polls, and when they found a man undecided, they ceased not their entreaties until they had gained him to the Temperance cause. More than this, two women finding an intemperate man in the street, talked to him four hours, before they could get him to promise to vote as they wished. Upon his doing so, they escorted him, one on each side, to the ballot-box, saw him deposit the vote they had given him, and then treated him to a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... fresh and striking contribution to current religious discussion. It is the average man,—the man in the street—who is at once the subject of Mr. Roberts' study. He is keenly alive to and frankly critical of the weaknesses, shortcomings and divisions of modern Christianity; but he has a well-grounded optimism and a buoyant faith which will be ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... and Lucien read the first of the delightful short papers which made the fortune of the little newspaper; a series of sketches of Paris life, a portrait, a type, an ordinary event, or some of the oddities of the great city. This specimen—"The Man in the Street"—was written in a way that was fresh and original; the thoughts were struck out by the shock of the words, the sounding ring of the adverbs and adjectives caught the reader's ear. The paper was as different from the serious and profound ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... that religious thought 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... although it is possible that his resignation may never be publicly announced. For one thing, the Kaiser and army people began to think it was a bad innovation to have any officer or official appealing to cheap newspapers and the "man in the street" in ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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
... easily until he was within arm's length of the other man in the street. "You're Fectnor, ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... therefore differs from them on every possible 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 ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... man in the street, the Society was just a bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to them. He didn't deal with ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... not exist for us; and if we affect the slim and willowy in figure, our contempt for the plump and rounded is too sincere for expression. Usually the type we choose is one whose beauty is somewhat esoteric to other eyes. We are well aware that photographs do it no justice, and that the man in the street—who, strangely enough, we conceive as having no eye for beauty—can see nothing in it. Thank Heaven, she is not the type that any common eye can see. Heads are not turned in her wake as she passes along. Her beauty is not "obvious." On the contrary, it is of that rare and exquisite quality ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 to the depths in the heart of Caponsacchi, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... obscure style of verse that makes much of his work very hard reading. Many Browning societies have been formed to study the works of the poet whom they are proud to call master; but Tennyson needs no societies, as the man in the street and the woman whose soul is troubled can understand every line he has written. Nor is Tennyson lacking in passion, as any one may see by reading ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... example. England could not logically object to their desire for 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 uncomfortable, ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... "Go home," said the Man in the Street; "the mining laws are rotten. All kinds of ground is tied up. Even if you get hold of something good, them dam-robber government sharks will flim-flam you out of it. There's no square deal here. They tax you to mine; they tax you to cut a tree; they tax you to sell a fish; pretty soon they'll ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the 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 ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... 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 important ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... ensured. Our naval supremacy is largely 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 must constitute ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... what forms their associations take. These will be the views respectively of the economist and the sociologist. Then we shall consider the regard in which the deaf are popularly held, the view of "the man in the street," and whether this regard is the proper and just one. Lastly, we shall note what movements have been undertaken in the interests of the deaf by private organizations, and to what extent these have ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... it may be useful and not illegitimate for him sometimes to try to convince the reader that his criticism is from the pen of one who knows more about the subject than lies within the range of the Man in the Street. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... himself as what we now call "The Man in the Street," far too bare of scientific clothing to satisfy the Mrs. Grundy of the domain: lacking all recognised tools of science and all sense of the difficulties in his way, he proceeded to tackle the problems of science with little save the deft pen of the literary expert ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... must be an inevitable reaction from austerity to a daring freedom which will take many various forms. From Carlyle's solemnising liturgy we were bound to pass to the slang and colloquialism of the man in the street and the woman in the modern novel. Body and spirit are always in unstable equilibrium, and an excess of either at once swings the fashion back to the other extreme. Carlyle had his day largely in consequence of what one may call the eighteenth-century glut—the Georgian society and its economics, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... eleven o'clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below. He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He pulled out from his wool cap with ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... just as the millers were leaving the flour mills for dinner. One would have thought that the sight of a white hat would have delighted the millers, but as these hats were rather dear, and beyond the financial reach of the man in the street, they had become an object of derision to those who could not afford to wear them, the music-hall answer to the question "Who stole the donkey?" being at that time "The ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... demands when he returned to 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 ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... make a kind of agreement that we will argue in a straightforward way, and not in a tail-foremost way. The typical modern movements may be right; but let them be defended because they are right, not because they are typical modern movements. Let us begin with the actual woman or man in the street, who is cold; like mankind before the finding of fire. Do not let us begin with the end of the last red-hot discussion—like the end of a red hot poker. Imperialism may be right. But if it is right, it is ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... The class gasped with astonishment at Pierre's boldness in asking it. The Abbe paused a moment before answering. Then he said, "If you, Pierre, were to shoot a man in the street in order to take his purse, would ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... which our own was the first English type, marks a very considerable revolution in the intellectual habits of the time. They have brought abstract discussion from the library down to the parlour, and from the serious student down to the first man in the street. We have passed through a perfect cyclone of religious polemics. The popularity of such Reviews means that really large audiences, le gros public, are eagerly interested In the radical discussion of propositions which twenty years ago were only ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... 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 partial ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... moment has come to think less, to aim less high, to look more closely, to observe better, to paint as well but differently. This is the painting of the crowd, of the townsman, the workman, the parvenu, the man in the street; done wholly for him, done from him. It is a question of becoming humble before humble things, small before small things, subtle before subtle things; of gathering them all together without omission and without disdain, ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... ask that 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 do it in order ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... home, too late for half a pipe; engagements about clothes, hats, dresses, guns, lunches, dinners, theatres, you have all in your mind, awake and asleep, and as you run about attending to essentials and superfluities, you jostle with the collarless man in the street, and note the hungry look, and reflect how thin is the ice that bears you and how easy it is to go through, just a step, and you are over the neck—collar gone and the crease out of the trousers. A friend of mine went through the other day and no one knew; he lived on brown bread and water ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... discouraged. National 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 a loan to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... as the man in the street generally thinks, the study of the "Mysterious," but is the attempt to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the ultimate Truth in everything, especially the perception of that wonderful Transcendental Power which is growing up ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... impossible to walk the street without being constantly assailed by this noxious vapor, as it is breathed from the mouths of all classes in community, from the sooty chimney-sweep, to the parson in his sacerdotal robe. You can scarcely meet a man in the street, with whom you have business, but he pours a stream of smoke into your face, exceedingly disgusting. And this he does too, without imagining that he transgresses the rules of politeness, or gives ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... 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 the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... sacredness of treaties, even if the wastepaper baskets of the Foreign Offices were not full of torn up "scraps of paper," and a very good thing too; for General von Bernhardi's assumption that circumstances alter treaties is not a page from Machiavelli: it is a platitude from the law books. The man in the street understood little or nothing about Servia or Russia or any of the cards with which the diplomatists were playing their perpetual game of Beggar my Neighbour. We were rasped beyond endurance by Prussian Militarism and its contempt for ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 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, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... next door may be a Christian Scientist and regard his own body as somehow rather less substantial than his own shadow. He may come almost to regard his own arms and legs as delusions like moving serpents in the dream of delirium tremens. The third man in the street may not be a Christian Scientist but, on the contrary, a Christian. He may live in a fairy tale as his neighbors would say; a secret but solid fairy tale full of the faces and presences of unearthly friends. The fourth man may be a theosophist, and only too probably a vegetarian; ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... philosophic 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 to his influence that the best journals and periodicals ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... doing, but we shall certainly say nothing new. One or two points, however, seem to me worthy of emphasis in this company of Johnsonians. I think we should resent two popular fallacies which you will not hear from literary students, but only from one whom it is convenient to call "the man in the street." The first is, that we should know nothing about Johnson if it were not for Boswell's famous life, and the second that Johnson the author is dead, and that our great hero only lives as a brilliant conversationalist in the ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... 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
... the things, asked Christian of his young companion, that first led you to leave off the vanities of the fair and to think to be a pilgrim? Many things, replied Hopeful. Sometimes if I did but meet a good man in the street. Or if mine head began unaccountably, or mine heart, to ache. Or if some one of my companions became suddenly sick. Or if I heard the bell toll that some one was dead. But, especially, when I thought of myself that I must ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... has gone on, 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 dare to make the claim. It is one of the prerogatives ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... 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 to ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... prejudice against the foreigner; helpless by reason of his patience, 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... try to look pacific or elaborately—see above again. But I should say nothing. My studied silence would annoy everybody. I was quite sure of this, because I really can do that sort of silence very well. The inevitable old woman with a bundle would fix me with her watery eye. "The man in the street," who, of course, would now be in the tram or train, would give a brief history of his three sons and one brother-in-law at the Front. The armleted conductor (we are now in the tram) would give my ticket ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... F.R.S. "A book that the 'man in the street' will recognise at once to be a boon.... Consistently lucid and ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... by an Italian man in the street, almost under the elevated station, and, as Flossie leaned over the stair railing to ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in a Great City • Laura Lee Hope
... 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 ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... means one thing and one thing only," Bellamy affirmed. "In Vienna and Berlin to-day they look at an Englishman and smile. Even the man in the street seems to know what ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... strained interpretation of the words. No 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
... 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 rotten at ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... caricature as a reproduction of the Empire period. To an observer, accuracy of detail in a revival of this sort is extremely valuable, but accuracy of detail, to be properly appreciated, demands the critical attention of an expert flaneur; while the man in the street who raises a laugh as soon as he comes in sight is bound to be one of those outrageous exhibitions which stare you in the face, as the saying goes, and produce the kind of effect which an actor tries to secure for the success of his entry. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the world. They say this out of politeness, because what they really believe is that he belongs to Germany, and that as a matter of fact Byron is the only great poet England has ever had. I am not joking. I am not even exaggerating. This is the real opinion of the German man in the street, and it is taught in lessons in literature. An English girl went to one of the best-known teachers in Berlin for lessons in German, and found, as she found elsewhere, that the talk incessantly turned on the crimes of England and the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Evangeline dear," Lady Merrenden said, gayly, "or you will have Robert breaking the head of every man in the street who even glances at you. He ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... the appointment with the two officers who, out of respect for our host, had discarded their uniforms for mufti. Consequently, to the casual man in the street, we appeared to be only a little party going into the city ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... somewhere within him a voice still said, "You will go." Nevertheless he was able partly to put off his hybrid feeling, half-dread, half-desire. The sleek people in the silk hats had made their little effect on the stranger. "The man in the street is often right," Dion said to himself; though he knew that the man in the street is probably there, and remains there, because ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... this juncture something occurred calculated to divert not only Mr. Furlong's sentence, but the fortunes and the surplus of St. Asaph's itself. At the very moment when Mr. Furlong was speaking a newspaper delivery man in the street outside handed to the sanctified boy the office copy of the noonday paper. And the boy had no sooner looked at its headlines than he said, "How dreadful!" Being sanctified, he had no stronger form of speech than that. But he handed the paper forthwith to one of the stenographers with hair like the ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... shame. Intellect has been disparaged and instinct has been exalted. Intuition is a safer guide than reason, we are told; for intuition goes straight to the heart of a situation and has already acted while reason is debating. Much of this new philosophy is a kind of higher obscurantism; the man in the street applauds Bergson and William James because he dislikes science and logic, and values will, courage and sentiment. He used to be fond of repeating that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of our public ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... everything, in our charities as in all else; too great liberality attracts beggars instead of helping them on their way. At the same time there is no harm when one is on a journey, or passing through a strange place, in appearing to a poor man in the street in the form of a chance deity of fortune and making him some present which shall surprise him. The position of the village and of the castle makes it easy for us to put our charities here on a proper footing. I have ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... "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
... aggressively summery. The younger men are not slow to follow so excellent an example—though generally there is the tendency to the dark grey, which is a compromise between the black of winter and the fiery white tweed which the man in the street is wont to wear. Sir Charles Russell—who, returning from Paris on the same day as Mr. Sexton, received a very warm welcome—is also a child of his age in his clothes. Time was when a great legal luminary—especially if he were on the bench—was supposed to be violating ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... 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, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... more than the best man practises, and his conscience is quick to decide the course for other people. Our weaknesses and compromises, and love of the world, might receive a salutary rebuke if we would try to meet the expectations which 'the man in the street' forms of us. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the Volstead Act, the scientific prohibitions aroused no opposition from the man in the street. Indeed, he rather approved of them. He needed and wanted the products of scientific research, but he had a vague fear of the scientist—the "egghead." To his way of thinking, the laws were cleverly-designed restrictions promulgated by that marvelous ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... girl had gotten her mother to say that she would never again put lobsters into cold water and slowly boil them to death. She had also stopped a man in the street who was carrying a pair of fowls with their heads down, and asked him if he would kindly reverse their position. The man told her that the fowls didn't mind, and she pursed up her small mouth and showed the band how she said to him, "I would prefer ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Played to Lose • Laurence Mark Janifer
... took his jokes in excellent part. The letters on the Tower and Chawsir were palpable hits, and it was generally agreed that Punch had contained nothing better since the days of Yellow-plush. This opinion was not confined to the man in the street. It was shared by the high-brows of the reviews and the appreciative of society, and gained Artemus the entree ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... readable and easy; written in a style that the man in the street will understand and the man in the university will admire. Just the book to start a ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... ourselves if we are true men, the strange thing is that it looks as if it must needs be that offences come even among brethren. The bitterest disputes in life are among those who are nearest each other in spirit. We do not quarrel with the man in the street, the man with whom we have little or no communication. He has not the chance, nor the power, to chafe our soul, and ruffle our temper. If need be, we can afford to despise, or at least to neglect him. It is the man of our own household, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... I am," said James. "If I met a man in the street I would know he must have a father and a mother, although I had never heard when he ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... and served by them, but any commercial value will also be exploited by him. The natural wonders of the laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of the man in the street. Even spiritualism apes the technique of the physicist. The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published daily for a brief to be made out ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... said bitterly. "No, I haven't. I can't give you what every girl wants—a well, strong man to be her husband—the health and strength that any man in the street has." ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... continually humbugged; and worse, many of the wealthy and intelligent, through their stake in valuable city franchises, are incompetent to deal fairly with the municipal affairs of their own city. Both in England and in America, the man in the street is quite sound in his judgment, when he declines to trust those who dabble in securities with which their own department has dealings. The British Caesar's wife official, caught with a handkerchief on her person, woven on the ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... to him, he ordered him and the servant of the Red Cock to leave everything and follow him. He had found a dead man in the street. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... real value. But this is quite a mistake. We cannot dispense with the doctrine of the Trinity, for it, or something like it, is implied in the very structure of the mind. It belongs to philosophy even more than to religion, and to the sphere of ethics not less. I daresay even the man in the street knows, quite as certainly as the man in the schools, that a metaphysical proposition underlies the doing of every moral act, even though it may never be expressed. All thinking starts with an assumption of some kind, and without an ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the violinist are always studying music, even when they practice a succession of single notes. Not so with the pianist, however, for an isolated note on the piano, whether played by the most accomplished artist or the man in the street, ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... 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 a mass of ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... as a beautiful woman, crowned, victorious, in bright armour and white robes, a light in her uplifted hand—a serene, calm, conquering goddess. Oh, the farce of it, oh, the folly of it! Liberty is NOT a crowned goddess, beautiful, in spotless garments, victorious, supreme. Liberty is the Man In the Street, a terrible figure, rushing through powder smoke, fouled with the mud and ordure of the gutter, bloody, rampant, brutal, yelling curses, in one hand a smoking rifle, in ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... out 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. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... 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. ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... 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 ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... public-spirited enough, with business-like zeal, and if you are borough councillor you may be proud of the nice new public baths which you have been instrumental in presenting to the community. But the ordinary man in the street no more cares for Kilburn than he does for Highgate. He would move from one to the other without a pang. For neither's glory would he shed a drop of his blood. Only at election times does it occur to him that he is ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... slightly on the shoulder. He turned; Ali pointed to the window of the room in which they were, facing the street. "I see!" said he, "there are two of them; one does the work while the other stands guard." He made a sign to Ali not to lose sight of the man in the street, and turned to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... men mounted a pair of compact Sicilian horses, which were held by still another man in the street behind the depot, and set off up the winding road which climbed to the village above. Blake regretted the lateness of the hour, which prevented him from gaining an adequate idea of his surroundings. He could see, however, that they were picturesque, for San Sebastiano lay in ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... talked chiefly resented. We might talk for an hour or for a 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 were the chief objects of the lust for revenge. A rebel, ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... schemes of raising trifling sums: He sometimes ordered his wife to inform people that he was just expiring, and by this artifice work upon their compassion; and many of his friends were frequently surprised to meet the man in the street to day, to whom they had yesterday sent relief, as to a person on the verge of death. At other times he would propose subscriptions for poems, of which only the beginning and conclusion were written; and by this expedient would relieve some present necessity. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Question as a dream. If we regard the Cosmos as a joke, we regard St. Paul's Cathedral as a joke. If everything is bad, then we must believe (if it be possible) that beer is bad; if everything be good, we are forced to the rather fantastic conclusion that scientific philanthropy is good. Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly. The possibility is that he may have held it so firmly and so long as to have forgotten all about ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... which any man in the street-car at home can tell you all about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on. Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... travelling incognita, and that fact alone robbed her progress of a sense of excitement. She had to do without the shout of the multitude—the passing admiration of the man in the street. She knew that she was yet many hours removed from Madrid, where she had admirers, and the next best possession—enemies. Ciudad Real was intolerably dull and provincial. A servant ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... imagine you being built of the same stuff as myself. Yet I venture to put my difficulty before you. It is, of course, no question of mental grasp or capacity or artistic endowment. I am, so far as these are concerned, merely the man in the street, the averagely endowed and the ordinarily educated. I call myself a Puritan and a Christian. I run continually against walls of convention, of morals, of taste, which may be all wrong, but which I should feel it wrong to climb over. You ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... the dim 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 by the fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... among the nations, was so strong that none dare commit suicide by commencing a war. Thus we spoke to each other, and that seemed an axiom. Further, it seemed to be true that even if a madman let loose the dogs of war, then it would be all over in a fortnight. The man in the street imagined that it would be a kind of parade (Aufmarsch), a mobilization test, and the power which succeeded best would be the victor, for no country in the world was strong enough to stand the enormous cost for longer than ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... 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 not, all of them imaginary Atlases ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... wildly 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 ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... at Alexis as if he doubted his sanity. That a Russian doctor should be able to take off the child's leg was within his comprehension. He had once seen a man in the street of Irkutsk with only one arm, but that anyone could make a child sleep so soundly that he would not wake under such an operation seemed to him beyond the ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... words ringing in his ears, his looks present before him. Again he felt the sensation of absolute sickness at his heart that had gripped him at the moment he had realised that the map had been photographed, passing as much out of his own power as though he had given it to a man in the street. Does any one really acknowledge in his inmost soul that he has on a given occasion done "wrong," without an immeasurable qualifying of that word, without a covert resentment at the way other people may label his action? There is but one person ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... and even its existence was now dangerous to Stella. For let it be 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 wait and he did not wait long. On the very ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... among the fierce modern critics who ask indignantly, "Why do you object to a thing full of sincere philosophy like The Wild Duck while you tolerate a mere dirty joke like The Spring Chicken?" I do not think he has ever understood what seems to me the very sensible answer of the man in the street, "I laugh at the dirty joke of The Spring Chicken because it is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of The Wild Duck ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... genius, what are we to say of Hamlet? And Blake, in the hierarchy of the inspired, stands very high indeed. If one could strike an average among poets, it would probably be true to say that, so far as inspiration is concerned, Blake is to the average poet, as the average poet is to the man in the street. All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making one, now and then, involuntarily ejaculate: 'What made him think of that?' With Blake, one is asking ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey |
