"Man in the street" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... of the darkness. "I beg your pardon, madam," he said. "I met this young man in the street, and he asked me to come here and see a playmate of his who is, I understand, an invalid. But if ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... shadow of party regularity as the supreme test in public affairs has passed away from the public mind. It is a great deliverance. The man in the street no longer asks about a measure or a policy merely whether it is good Republican or good Democratic doctrine. Now he asks whether it is honest, and means what it says, whether it will promote the public interest, weaken special privilege, and ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... 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. ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Admiral Farragut, General W. T. Sherman, James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Robert E. Lee? None of these people were Presidents of the United States. But to the man in the street there is something imposing about the office and title of a chief magistrate, be he emperor, king, or elected head of a republic. It sets him apart. Look at the crowds that swarm to get a glimpse of the President when he passes through, no matter whether it is George Washington ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... truism 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 homicidal outrages ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... very little known, while the official teaching of churches and theologies is so hard to explain that not much of it gets over to the masses of those willing to subscribe to it. I refer only to the impression on the mind of the man in the street; and to the man in the street God, as he understands Him, is neither a very friendly nor a very comprehensible element in life. Instead of mitigating fear He adds to it, not in the Biblical sense of "fearing God," but in that of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... 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 hardly aware of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... stumbled upon the man in the street. He was most comfortably drunk, and pleasant and chatty. Harte remarked upon the splendidly and movingly dramatic incident of the restaurant, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the 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 other bulwarks of our united Empire. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... he appeared, for the only time I suppose in his life, as a witness in a Court of Justice, being called to give evidence to the character of Mr. Baretti, who having stabbed a man in the street, was arraigned at the Old Bailey for murder[294]. Never did such a constellation of genius enlighten the aweful Sessions-House, emphatically called JUSTICE HALL; Mr. Burke, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Beauclerk, and Dr. Johnson; and undoubtedly their favourable testimony ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... 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. The elderly person, a thin, spare man, wore a ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... is a good deal of this sort of pride in the careful and conscientious suppression of the egoistic in books and speeches. I have nothing of this modesty to be proud of. I know that I am cleverer than the man in the street, though I take no credit to myself for it, as it is a mere accident of birth, and on the whole a regrettable one. It was this absence of modesty from my composition that recently enabled me to propose the toast of literature ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... "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. ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... to "proclaim upon the houses" was to proclaim or expound in the assembly of the Perfect, the Initiated, and by no means to shout aloud to the man in the street. ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... 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
... the street when he speaks—that man in the street who reflects public opinion whether it is just or unjust, genuine or sophisticated. Listen to him when he speaks and you ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... public and appeals mainly to musicians. But the greatest men do not go over the heads of the masses, they take them rather by the hand. The true musician would not snub so much as a musical critic. His instinct is towards the man in the street rather than the Academy. Perhaps I say this as being myself a man in the street musically. I do not know, but I know that Bach does not appeal to me and that I do appeal from Bach to the man in the street and not to the Academy, because I believe ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... 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, near us in life and spirit, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... 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 ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... look discreetly. They looked out of wide-open windows, they even sat perilously and protrudingly on the window sills conversing across the facade from window to window, attracting attention, and once to Mrs. Pembrose's certain knowledge a man in the street joined in. It was on a Sunday morning, too, a ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the tower the world below him is likely to look very small. Men look like ants and all the bustle and stir of their hurrying lives seems pitifully confused and aimless. But the man in the street who is looking and striving upward is in a different situation. However poor his present plight, the thing he aims at and is striving toward stands out clear and distinct above him, inspiring him with hope and ambition in his struggle upward. For the man who is down there ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... of high family, was very poor, and men said it was by the fault of his cousin Kallias, the "Enriched by the Well;" and Themistocles contrived to turn people's minds against him, so as to have him ostracised. One day he met a man in the street, with a shell in his hand, who asked him to write the name of Aristides on it, as he could not write himself. "Pray," said Aristides, "what harm has this person done you, that you wish ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had time to get used to the treatment; every man in my corps gets a full dose of awe and respect from the services, from Government officials and even from the United Cabinets. The only reason we don't get it from the man in the street is that the man in the street—unless he happens to be a very special man in a very unusual street—doesn't know the corps exists. Which is a definite relief, by the way; at least, off the job, I'm no more ...
— The Man Who Played to Lose • Laurence Mark Janifer
... theoretical facility switched on to this place. Even allowing that Russia should obtain a concession of this place—a most unlikely thing to be asked for or conceded while Persia remains an independent country—matters would not be as simple for Russia as the man in the street takes them ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... 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 a very rude punch and my penny a very angry stare. When I was quite sure I had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... pink sheets. Rachel actually bought one herself; and overheard the opinion of the man in the street without a pang. So she might think herself lucky! But she did, she did; in the reaction that had come upon her with the first mouthful of raw air, in the intoxication of treading the outer world again, she thought herself the luckiest woman in London, ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... Shaw in America, no man who can write brilliant prefaces and essays about his own plays until the man in the street is obliged perforce to regard them as literature, we find ourselves in the condition of benighted France. Dulness is mistaken for literary flavour; the injection of a little learning, of a little poetry (so-called) into a theatrical ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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 right because England has some divine authority ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... language of the day, a Danish to be based on the dialects of the common people, the folk-songs, popular proverbs, and the old hymns. It was a bold undertaking, comparable to the work of Luther in modelling the language of the German Bible after the speech of the man in the street and the mother at the cradle, or to the great effort of Norway in our days to supplant the Danish-Norwegian tongue with a language from the various dialects of her people. Nor can it be said that Grundtvig was immediately successful in his attempt. His version of the sagas sounds somewhat ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... 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
... 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 whites, that we cannot obtain the comforts ...
— 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
... 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
... American cousins would call a "spectacular" dog. Given, for example, the best team of terriers and a fifth-rate team of Borzois, which attracts the more attention and admiration from the man in the street? Which does he turn again to look at? Not the terriers! Add to this that the Borzoi makes a capital house dog, is, as a rule, affectionate and a good companion, it is not to be wondered at that he has attained ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... day before these happenings I was over in Tunbridge Wells, and I got a glimpse of a man in the street. It was only a glimpse; but I have a quick eye for these things, and I never doubted who it was. It was the worst enemy I had among them all—one who has been after me like a hungry wolf after a caribou all these years. I knew there was trouble coming, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would not 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 the operations of external criticism come under different categories. Similarly, in a stoneyard ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... though plainly skeptical. A short, fat man, who was standing near the saloon door, looked on with a half-sneer. Several others were smiling blandly. A tall man on the extreme edge of the crowd, near the rider, was watching the man in the street gravely. Other men had allowed various expressions to creep into their faces. But all ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... 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. These shows are variously traced back to the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... 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 pages of Boswell and others. Boswell's Life of Johnson is ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one else's clever paradoxes ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from all their natural settings, identifies them with definitions, and treats the latter more algebraico, not only risks mixing universes, but risks fallacies which the man in the street easily detects. To prove 'by definition' that the statement 'Caesar exists' is identical with a statement about 'expediency' because the one statement is 'true' and the other is about 'true statements,' is like proving that an omnibus is ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... up all the theatres, and he said he'd make them pay. And his cousin, the Man in the Street, took shares. And they organised the Theatre. And they made it efficient. And they conducted it on sound commercial lines. And the magic vanished and people wondered where and why. Now what we're going ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... 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 ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the Duke's Lawn, as the man in the street in Dublin still calls it, contains, among other attractions, the National Gallery, Museum, and Public Library. These are store houses of treasure. The catalogue of the Gallery reveals a valuable collection of paintings, and the Museum contains an unique exhibition of gold, silver, ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... the only man in the Street, sir," declared young Bristoll one morning, in a burst of admiration, as he and his chief sat together over their coffee, "to whom J.J. Malone seems willing to grant an ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... all that," Southey returned. "Fortunately for him the doctor could account for every hour of his time. Of course, the man in the street was suspicious of him—is still, perhaps, to some extent, but it hasn't prevented his getting on. He married Ruth Lester, and I hear is getting ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Shaftesbury, for instance, was on duty in Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, with a sallow young foreigner for companion, who was afterwards to create a more serious disturbance on his own account, and to spring to power as Napoleon III. Thomas Carlyle preferred to play the part of the untrammelled man in the street, and sallied forth in search of food for reflection. He wanted to see the 'revolution' for himself, and strode towards Hyde Park, determined, he tells us, to walk himself into a glow of heat in spite of the 'venomous ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... artificial, since it cannot become important or practical unless a certain environment gives play to individual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction nevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does the man in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he had been born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him as he is, but only as he might have been, if per impossibile he had not been himself. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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
... brought the news that Cronje had surrendered, yet the evening saw the garrison again reduced to quarter rations. This was only a precautionary measure, for Buller had helioed 'everything progressing favourably.' But the man in the street was sceptical. If favourable, why reduce the ration? Thus it was that Tuesday, Majuba Day—although on that date the tide of fortune had turned in our favour—marked the lowest pitch of despondency into which the garrison was ever plunged ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... were sung, and Berchtold was scoffed at because he could not "exert himself to take any energetic steps." This must not be taken as an excuse for any eventual mistakes on the part of the leaders of the nation, for a leading statesman ought not to allow himself to be influenced by the man in the street. It is only to prove that the spirit developed in 1914 appears to have been very general. And it may perhaps be permitted to add this comment: how many of those who then clamoured for war and revenge and demanded ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... have attracted attention anywhere. Men who have accomplished much in life usually bear plainly upon their persons the indefinable stamp of achievement, whether of good or evil, which renders them conspicuous among their fellows. We turn after a man in the street and ask, Who is he? And nine times out of ten the object of our curiosity is a man who has made his mark—a successful soldier, a famous sailor, a celebrated author, a distinguished lawyer, or even ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... omne[Lat]; the many, the 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
... war." Owing to the difficulty and danger of the operations and the extended front on which they were carried out, any newspaper correspondent present could hope to chronicle only a sub-section of the action. The public, therefore, was without any complete record of what happened.[11] To the man in the street the British general and his forces seemed to spend three months in perpetual dodging in and about some thirty ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... 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 ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... 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
... Naturally, to the average 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... 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 thought about ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... building, and local societies were kept in touch. Every effort was made to reach labor unions and other organizations of men with speakers and educational propaganda and to carry information to the man in the street, who often had never heard of the Woman Suffrage Association. The executive board met every two weeks and later every week or oftener. Mrs. Page, its chairman, was followed in 1911 by Mrs. Marion Booth Kelley; in 1912 by Mrs. Gertrude B. Newell, and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... reading out letters from certain distinguished R.A.'s, in which the use of the flat copy in elementary schools was openly advocated. It was evident that those distinguished R.A.'s knew as much about elementary education as the man in the street knows about naval tactics, for the arguments by which they supported their paradoxical opinions were worth exactly nothing. But the salvos of applause, renewed again and again, which greeted the extracts from their letters showed clearly ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... disputation as to the historical origin of the 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
... possess much 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 assumption thought is impossible. This is just as true of the ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... confusing to simpletons, because according to 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 carrying ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Chamberlain's war pamphlets are distinctly better reading than the great majority of their kind? They are much more individual, much less stereotyped and monotonous. One finds in them an occasional idea that is not the common property of every man in the street. It is generally (not always) a more or less crazy idea, but one hails it as an oasis in the ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... Street. It was quiet and quaint, but something pressed home to us that was not all joy—the tightness of old scar-tissue in the chest.... The countryman came running to us from the still standing car, though this was not his destination, and pointing to a little grey man in the street, said: ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... 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 within, or in close connection with, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... in her own right, declaring war single-handed on a monster so mightily armored and intrenched and so brutally strong as the Vice Trust appealed instantly to the crowd's imagination. In the crowd's thought, at least, the girl became a heroine. And though the man in the street openly wearing an air of cheap cynicism spoke of her as "another crazy reformer" or as a "notoriety-hunting crank," secretly he responded to the enthusiasm of the headline writer who announced her as a "modern ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... of condescension, and selecting with the greatest care only words that the man in the street could understand, he proceeded ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... sheets and the coarseness of their type is any proof of frivolity and ignorance, there is no doubt that English people scarce consider news read there as news, any more than a programme bought from a man in the street inspires confidence in what it says. A very respectable elderly pair, having inspected the long tables of newspapers, did not think it worth their while to read more ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... over," said Lousteau, 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 article on ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... was back in London now, back in the leafy Park, back in Knightsbridge. He looked down into the street, and noted that a man was loitering on the opposite side. The man in the street saw that the Dictator noted him. He looked up at the Dictator, looked up above the Dictator, and, raising his hat, pointed as if towards the sky. The Dictator, following the direction of the gesture, turned slightly and looked upwards, and received a sudden thrill ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... both collaborated. Morten had no respect for the existing laws and little for the new. He did not play a very zealous part in the work of party organization, and was rather held at arm's length by the leaders. But his relations with the man in the street were of the closest. He worked independently; there was scarcely his match in individual cases of need or injustice; and he was always laboring to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... her papa's chamber quite out of breath, crying, "O dear papa, only come here! here is a man in the street that has a large cage on his head, with, I dare say, a hundred Canary-birds in it."—"Well, and what of all that?" replied her papa; "why does that seem to rejoice you so much?" Nancy answering, that she should be happy to buy one of them; her papa reminded ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... 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 ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... millions 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 secret society ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... I understand fairly well what you gentlemen want," he said. "You want to get hold of little stories of heroism, and so forth, and to write them up in a bright way to make good reading for Mary Ann in the kitchen, and the Man in the Street." The quiet passion with which those words were resented by us, the quick repudiation of this slur upon our purpose by a charming man perfectly ignorant at that time of the new psychology of nations in a war which was no longer ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... sifted. His character was half 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 ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... was that, unlike 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 epitome of humanity, the common ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... than ever before. Here was a woman of mind and heart, one not bounded by narrow sectionalism, but seeing the good wherever it might be. He felt that he had behaved like a prig and a fool. Why should he be influenced by the idle words of some idle man in the street? He was not Lucia Catherwood's guardian; if there were any question of guardianship, she was much better fitted to be the guardian ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... contents. The official appointment, which gives him absolute power over the public life or death of a play, gives to the public no guarantee of his fitness for the post. So far as the public can judge, he was chosen as the typical "man in the street," the "plain man who wants a plain answer," the type of the "golden mean," or mediocrity. We hear that he is honest and diligent, that he reads every word of every play sent for his inspection. These are the virtues ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... again, the conception of the plurality and interaction of causes has become part of our habitual mental furniture; but in politics both the book-learned student and the man in the street may be heard to talk as if each result had only one cause. If the question, for instance, of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is raised, any two politicians, whether they are tramps on the outskirts of a Hyde Park crowd or Heads of Colleges writing to the Times, are not unlikely ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... something; you 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 deliberately mispronounce proper ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 matter how they've come down in the world. And it's like that ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... 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, ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... has, in The Dardanelles (CONSTABLE), added a volume to a series called Campaigns and Their Lessons, it is clear that he is writing mainly for military students, but none the less at least one man in the street—meaning myself—has been glad, after reading plenty of merely descriptive accounts of the Gallipoli affair, to find a book that frankly and justifiably does lay claim to technical proficiency. The exponents of vivid narrative, modestly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... it might almost be said that then it is difficult for the British general not to catch the enemy. It is a question of what in chess we call the "opposition," and the visit by the Britisher to town 1 "gives him the jump" on the enemy, as the man in the street would say. ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... statesmen too shrewd and experienced not to understand that their greatest strength will always lie in this fundamental axiom. On leaving San Remo for Rome or London let them ask the opinion of the 'man in the street.' His reply will be: 'Avant tout, restez unis avec ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... of the man in the street is the idea that the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were contemporaries of Christ; and that the Gospels were written and circulated during ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... showed himself so sensitive to mere externals that he is always aware only of externals. Unfortunately a very great deal of true and fervid piety exists under this apparent passion for externals. Remember that the ordinary criticism by the man in the street of Catholic ceremonies and of Catholic methods of worship involves us all in this condemnation. I suppose that you would consider yourself justified, should the circumstances permit (which in this case of course they do not), in protesting against a priest's not taking ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... some 100,000 was nearer the 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 handfuls ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... "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
... the deaf to associate more with 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 ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... 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 ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... 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 ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... difficult question to answer. If he were cutting up shines it would be easy, but if he were clever enough to pretend to be sane it might be difficult. You see, he would have to be arrested, no man can go up and seize another man in the street and say: You're mad, come along with me, simply because, even if he holds a certificate of lunacy against the other man the other man might say you've made a mistake, I'm not the person you want. Then it would be a question ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... incidents—such as the Ems affair—which directly led up to it were after all only of secondary importance, although they bulked so largely at the time of their occurrence. I well remember the great excitement which prevailed in Paris during the few anxious days when to the man in the street the question of peace or war seemed to be trembling in the balance, though in reality that question was already virtually decided upon both sides. Judging by all that has been revealed to us during the last forty years, I do not think that M. ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the personalities of Cabinet Ministers more prominently into the public eye. "We are not sufficiently known," said Sir WILLIAM SUTHERLAND, who has the matter in hand, "as living palpitating figures to the man in the street. We do not grip the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... The man in the street knows little of the silent man who is undoubtedly the greatest police organiser in the world. Even on this very matter of finger-prints there is a general confusion with Bertillonage—a totally different thing. The Henry system has practically ousted ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... To anybody who remembered history for a few years back, even with the general memory of the man in the street, to anybody who had read the controversies about the war, Morocco brought not puzzle, but enlightenment. For had not Morocco been really the starting point of the Years of Crisis—those years intermittent in excitement, ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... important: Villemain's Miscellanies, Merimee's Jacquerie, Madame Roland's Memoirs, not to speak of his own small Critical and Anecdotal Dictionary of Paris Signboards, published under a pseudonym, or rather anonymously, since it was signed Le Batteur de Pave, the "Man in the Street." But the senior partner, he who should have financed the concern with all the more wariness as d'Assonvillez, the principal supplier of capital, had a mortgage upon the whole estate, allowed himself to be paid for his printing, more often than not, in bills for which no provision ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... mere trifle," replied the agent; "almost nothing, indeed." And drawing his chair nearer to the bed on which his employee was seated, he added: "But first, one question, Victor. By the way in which a woman looks at a young man in the street, at the theatre or anywhere—would you know if ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... 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 has an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seems to say like that, "Who ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 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. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... 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 ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... sentences, when I reflect how rude and rough these specimens of feminine character generally were. They had a readiness with their hands that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in Fielding's novels. For example, I have seen a woman meet a man in the street, and, for no reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff his ears,—an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience, only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his heels. Where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a man in the street you were anxious to speak to, and you jumped from a cab to catch him, and lost sight of him through ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... eye and thought are occupied with other subjects. Those who object to this class of advertisement assert, with some show of reason, that an advertisement has no more right to assault the eye in this fashion than to storm the ear by an inordinate din; and a man who came up behind another man in the street, placed his mouth close to the other's ear, and bawled a recommendation of some brand of soap or tobacco, would be regarded as an intolerable disturber of public peace and comfort. Yet if the owner of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... penny, and there is a never-ending procession of Napoleons and Nelsons to the Guildhall to receive swords and freedoms and honorary degrees, the arrival of a Shah of Persia stirs the imagination of the man in the street. He feels something of the old thrill. But in the nineties, of course, we talked about nothing else for weeks. "Have you seen the Shah?" was the popular catch-phrase of the day; there were music hall songs about him; he was almost as ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... 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
... I can gather, m'lady, Miss Mariner struck a man in the street with a stick, and they took both her and Rooke to the Chelsea ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... we ever start the push they'll read every detail," said our wisest man. "It's the push that is in everybody's mind. The man in the street is tired of hearing about rehearsals. He wants the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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 ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Now the man in the street knows nothing of Biometrika: all he knows is that "you can prove anything by figures," though he forgets this the moment figures are used to prove anything he wants to believe. If he did take in Biometrika he would probably become abjectly credulous as to all the conclusions ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... now active in the world, it 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 ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... can hand it, if he is convinced of the truth of what he is saying, will capture the honest voter every time. I tell you, little woman, there's a thing we politicians are constantly losing sight of: that down at the bedrock bottom the American voter—'the man in the street,' as the newspapers call him—is a fair man and an honest man. Speaking broadly, you couldn't buy him with a clear title to a quarter-section ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... irreligious men expect you to do.' The worst man knows 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 man in the street and every soul in the hotel to know your private affairs?" demands Bingo. "If so, go on shoutin'. As to your bein' a widower, the chances are on the other side.... Gueldersdorp ain't exactly what you would call a healthy place just now. And as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... 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 street ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various
... the country entirely for her sake, some years ago. And even Georgie would not have taken as seriously as Emily did the least accidental exchange of courtesies with the eligible male. If the two girls, wasting a morning in the shops in town, happened to meet some hurrying young man in the street, the color rushed into Emily's face, and she alluded to the incident a dozen times during the course of the day. Like most girls, she had a special manner for men, a rather audacious and attractive manner, Susan thought. The conversation ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... and which it was their pleasure to leave untouched. This bit of mischief, and a few others of the same stamp, would sometimes bring a smile on the face of the younger of Guillaume's daughters, the pretty maiden who has just now appeared to the bewitched man in the street. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... made us lose all sense of number and magnitude in matters of finance. What we believed to be the limits of possibility have been so enormously exceeded, and those who founded their expectations on the past have been so often wrong, that the man in the street is now prepared to believe anything which is told him with some show of authority, and the larger the figure the more readily ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... pound, they ask how the poor are going to live. The young men of the place seem to have quite lost heart, and no longer muster spirit enough to murder anybody. Loughrea is disloyal as the sea is salt. The man in the street is full of grievances. His poverty and ignorance make him the mark of lying agitators, who arouse in his simple soul implacable resentment for imaginary wrongs. A decent civil working-man named Hanan ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... 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 knocked ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... precocious young person, and very much of a tomboy into the bargain. I think I was far more likely to have been found on the top of an apple-tree or walking the length of the seminary fence than writing rhymes or reading "solid reading." I know that I was once told by a queer old man in the street that little girls should not walk fences, and that I stood still and looked at him, transfixed with contempt. I do not think I vouchsafed him any answer at all. But this must have been while I was still ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... 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 ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... the room. Gervaise, trembling from head to foot, sat for a full hour on the side of her bed without undressing. She was profoundly touched and thought Coupeau very honest and very kind. The tipsy man in the street uttered a groan like that of a wild beast, and the notes of the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola |
