"Man in the street" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... stepped forward 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. But ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... would dare to dress herself like this at eleven in the morning? Go! And do not 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
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... school playmates 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
... are called,) the white christians of America will serve him the same, they will 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 ...
— 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
... 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 for ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... sometimes polluted by this loathsome practice. It is 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 you any ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... 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 ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... hear a new slang phrase and instantly you realize that the 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. And look how they ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and something like ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... For the man in the street and his children, there are to be seen everywhere in China where a sufficient number of people gather together, Punch-and-Judy shows of quite a high class in point of skill and general attractiveness. ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... general,the crowd, the people, the populace, the multitude, the million, the masses, the mobility, the peasantry; king Mob; proletariat; fruges consumere nati[Lat], demos, hoi polloi [Grk][Grk][Grk], great unwashed; man in the street. mob; rabble, rabble rout; chaff, rout, horde, canaille; scum of the people, residuum of the people, dregs of the people, dregs of society; swinish multitude, foex populi[obs3]; trash; profanum vulgus[Lat], ignobile vulgus[Lat]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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 ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... 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
... themselves than with the rest of the people, and 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 ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... 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, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... realm of scientific literature, however, this reticence is not maintained. Experiments may be there described in terms so abstruse and technical, that, while clear enough to the professional reader, they convey little or no meaning to the man in the street. There would seem to be a growing tendency to state certain facts in carefully shrouded phraseology, in complete confidence that the full meaning will not be discerned. Within the past few years, therefore, a large ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... 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 being indissoluble, if the credit ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... himself assumed the lead and bore the brunt of the battle. Till 1865 his main obstacle was Palmerston, who since he took the helm in the worst days of the Crimean War and conducted the ship of State into harbour, occupied an impregnable position. Palmerston was dear to 'the man in the street', shared his prejudices and understood his humours; and nothing could make him into a serious Democrat or reformer. Even after Palmerston's death, Bright's chief opponent was to be found in the Whig ranks, in Robert Lowe, who was a master of parliamentary eloquence and who managed, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... 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
... 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
... How is your son? I hope he is better. They told me he had been horribly used by a dreadful man in the street.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... diplomat in an undiplomatic moment: and expressed well the official mind. "They are six of one and half a dozen of the other," said the man in the street when he heard of massacres, village-burnings, and tortures in the Balkans; and he turned to the football news with undisturbed mind, seeking something on which a fair opinion could be formed ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... 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 ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... though 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
... clothes. I was a tailor in Windmill Street before I went in for pawnbroking, and I know. This chap's suit hadn't been 'acked out in the City or in one of those places in Cheapside where they put notices in the window to say that the foreman cutter is the only man in the street who gets twelve quid a week. They hadn't come from Crouch End, neither. They was first-class West End garments. It's the same with clothes as it is with thoroughbred hosses and women—you can always tell them, no ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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
... him no surprise. Because it was the first contact Humanity had had with a non-human race, the Mars discoveries made an overwhelming impression on the man in the street. The result was that for the first time in Post-Synthesis history all artifacts were reserved for ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... during the next half hour—that is, Nora talked. What Scanlon said he could never afterward remember. But there was one thing which always brought the fact of the conversation sharply to his mind—and that was his conjectures as to the man in the street below. Why was he there? and to whom was ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... Winchester or Canterbury. You may perform civic duties, if you are 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
... They fed on them, and got something out of them; but how far they were from the true perception of their meaning! This generation abhors mystery, and demands that the deepest truths of the highest subject, which is religion, shall be so broken down into mincemeat that the 'man in the street' can understand them in the intervals of reading the newspaper. There are only too many of us who are disposed to grasp at the most superficial interpretation of Christian truth, and lazily to rest ourselves in that. A ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 pages of Boswell ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... with a cloak of impenetrable mystery. Few people, except those employed on their construction or who happened to live in the immediate vicinity of where they were built, even knew of their existence, and such ignorance prevailed concerning airships of every description that the man in the street hailed a small non-rigid as "the British Zeppelin" or admired the appearance of R 23 as "the Silver Queen." The authorities no doubt knew their own business in fostering this ignorance, although for many reasons it was unfortunate ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... dynasty from his once picturesque position in the sympathies of Western admirers. Criticism directed against him during the Balkan wars fell on deaf ears; and the censorship to a great extent prevented the man in the street from realizing during the late War that an Allied Monarch was suspected of 'not playing the game.'" Mr. Ronald M'Neill, M.P., who loved to dance in front of Nicholas, informs us (in the Nineteenth Century and After, for January 1921) that "so far as the present ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 us and for human happiness and common ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Albert-Pozieres road. 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 bureaucrat, and ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... 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 right because England has some divine ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... easily until he was within arm's length of the other man in the street. "You're Fectnor, ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... 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 ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... 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
... October 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 ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... well, in the days when we used to have visits from him, that Professor Newman was looked upon by very many as a mere faddist. His extreme views on several subjects no doubt took him out of range of the sympathies of the "man in the street." But it is strange to find, on looking through these letters, how advanced opinion is coming into line with his so-called outrageous ideas of a generation ago. It would have given him keen pleasure, if he could have ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... confidence in the success of the loan. Bank subscriptions were 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 ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... has got to begin with a short historical disquisition. Many people are puzzled to know why Lord HUGH CECIL wears that worried look, and why Lord ROBERT also looks so sad. Yet the explanation is simple enough. It is because nobody can pronounce their surname. "Cessil," says the man in the street (and being in a street is a thing that may happen to anybody) as he sees the gaunt careworn figures going by. And when they hear it the sensitive ear of the CECILS is wrung with torture at the sound. They wince. They would like to buttonhole the man in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... 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
... 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 a conflict with ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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
... 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 wouldn't speak ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... only shifted me from the frying-pan into the fire; it was just among these that my inquiry brought the greatest ignorance and bewilderment to light; they very soon convinced me that the real golden life is that of the man in the street. One of them would have me do nothing but seek pleasure and ensue it; according to him, Happiness was pleasure. Another recommended the exact contrary—toil and moil, bring the body under, be filthy and squalid, disgusting and abusive—concluding always with the tags from Hesiod about Virtue, or ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... inborn 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Popish by most of our countrymen. But angels, with certain 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) ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... occur to others less versed in this difficult and highly specialised branch; those who have spent their lives in the construction of catalogues and the compilation of regesta construct and compile them more easily, more quickly, and better than the man in the street. Thus, not only is there no special reason for requiring every "historian" to be at the same time an active worker in the field of critical scholarship, but even those scholars who are engaged in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... then he might miss the doorway. Also until the hour the cafe closed the street was as light as day. Then the policeman was all alert for people in the middle of the street. His own safety depended upon it too. How was the man in the street to be dispensed with, yet the result attained? If the Boulevard was not so wide, a person on the opposite side in a front room might fire a dynamite bomb across, as they do from dynamite ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr |
