M

"Pity the meek for they shall inherit the earth."

Don Marquis

"An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience."

Don Marquis

"A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists."

Don Marquis

"Those are my principles, if you don't like them I have others."

Groucho Marx

"Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"Life's a long headache in a noisy street."

John Masefield, The Widow in the Bye Street

"It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it."

William Somerset Maugham

"She said that was all there was in this world, people who let you down."

Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no-one, has become the modern form of despotism."

Mary McCarthy

"Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to be as mediocre as possible."

Margaret Mead

"Whom the gods love dies young."

Menander, Dis Exapaton

"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore."

H.L. Mencken

"It is not true that life is one damned thing after another - it's one damn thing over and over."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests."

Henry Miller

"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

Henry Miller

"The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive."

Henry Miller

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

John Milton, Areopagitica

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilisation which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilised world."

Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden

"I love children. Especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away."

Nancy Mitford

"The amazing thing is that, never mind how legless you get, you tend to end up in your bed. I reckon there's some Fairy Godmother of Drunkenness who transports you from Stourbridge town centre, up Vicarage Road, and into your bed."

Adam Mole

"Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers."

Lewis Mumford

"Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell."

Clint Murchison