"Superman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think." He walked up close to me. "Sure I know there's a mob down there," he said. "And I know why they're there. Plain scared to death of what it means to have had a telepath loose in Washington. You're wrong to hustle this guy out of town, Gyp. Look at this pathetic case—does he look like a superman?" ...
— Tinker's Dam • Joseph Tinker
... relation in which Mr. Shaw stands to paganism, his relations to anything are so "extensive and peculiar" that they are always difficult to define. But the later phase of his work, which has become famous in connection with the word "Superman," is due in large part to Nietzsche, whose strange influence has reversed the Christian ideals for many disciples on both sides of the North Sea. So this idealist, who, in Major Barbara, protests so vigorously against paganism, has become one of its chief advocates and ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... of morality, the inspiration for character, the solution of human destiny, are not sought outside in some sort of cosmic relationship, but within, either in the experience of the superman, the genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collective experience and consciousness of the group. Thus this, too, throws man back upon himself, makes a new exaltation of personality in sharpest contrast to the scholastic ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... and he is an uncompromising aristocrat. As a pagan, he is a consistent enemy of Christianity. As an aristocrat, he is a bitter opponent of democracy. He proclaims that Anti-Christ has appeared in his own person. He hails the advent of the Superman. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... in the author's works, there is even more about Julius Caesar in the preface than there is in the play. But in the preface I think the portrait is less imaginative and more fanciful. He attempts to connect his somewhat chilly type of superman with the heroes of the old fairy tales. But Shaw should not talk about the fairy tales; for he does not feel them from the inside. As I have said, on all this side of historic and domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and deficient. He does not ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and varied; the man at the head of it capable, exacting and impartial. His sole aim was to produce and to export munitions at a price high enough to attract industry and low enough to prevent profiteering. For three years he was the superman of Canada's industrial fabric. The C.M.A. and the Department of Trade became mere annexes to munitions, at a time when Davies' bacon clamoured for ship-room needed by ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... capacity for giving himself away. It would seem that, after all, humour is the best gift of the gods.... Our commentator ends with an epigram to the general effect that "until they adopt, in common with us, the ideal of the Gentleman, in contradistinction to that of the Superman," we must continue to strafe them in war or peace. His book constitutes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... she will only be fitted for it when she has trained herself for motherhood and man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and woman can begin together to bring up the new generation out of which some day society will be formed. In it the completed man—the superman—will be bathed in that sunshine whose distant rays but colour the horizon ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... new conclusion. The despair of institutions, and the inexorable "ye must be born again," with Mrs Poyser's stipulation, "and born different," recurs in every generation. The cry for the Superman did not begin with Nietzsche, nor will it end with his vogue. But it has always been silenced by the same question: what kind of person is this Superman to be? You ask, not for a super-apple, but for an eatable apple; not for a superhorse, but for a horse of greater draught or velocity. Neither is ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... wanted to, if it made her happy. He would take her cup of tenderness and drink it as if it were sacramental wine, on his knees. But he doesn't count. He has to be man to so many people that there is danger of his becoming a kind of superman. Think of the old Mossback being a progressive thing like that! I laughed out loud at the idea—but the ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... its essential nobility. To them Don Juan is the type of libertine and little more. He was a prime favorite with those Romanticists who, like Gautier, felt "Il est indcent et mauvais ton d'tre vertueux." But as conceived in Spain Don Juan's libertinage is wholly subsidiary and incidental. He is a superman whose soaring ambition mounts so high that earth cannot satisfy it. The bravest may be permitted to falter in the presence of the supernatural; but Don Juan fears neither heaven nor hell. His bravery transcends all known ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... what this is? Perhaps it is the German in him. For, in spite of all Nietzsche's Mediterraneanizing of this Superman, Goethe was profoundly and inveterately German. The Rhine-Maidens rocked him in his cradle and, though he might journey to Rome or Troy or Carthage, it was to the Rhine-Maidens that he returned. Yes, I do not think that those understand him best who keep bowing ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... Those who come forward to fill these same places, and to command them with equal or greater authority and competence, will not be plaster saints, laden with all human virtue, spotless in character and fit to be anointed with a superman legend by some future Parson Weems. They will be men with a human quality, and a strong belief in the United States and the goodness of a free society. They will have some of the average man's faults, and maybe a few ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... better be said—although it is safe to assert that these moulders of American institutions knew little about that terrible philosopher who had raised his voice against the "slave morals of Christianity." It was their first experience with the superman.... It remained for the Canadian, Radeau, when a lull arrived in the turmoil, to suggest that the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... very new. We cannot in our graduated and polite civilization quite make head or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way that his tale is the tale of the Missing Link, and that his head is the head of the superman. We hear his lonely cry of anger. But we cannot be quite certain whether his protest is the protest of the first anarchist against government, or whether it is the protest of the last savage against civilization. The cruelty of ages and of political ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... words and big visions has brought forth a race of small men in politics, so it has brought forth a race of small men in the arts. Our modern politicians claim the colossal license of Caesar and the Superman, claim that they are too practical to be pure and too patriotic to be moral; but the upshot of it all is that a mediocrity is Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our new artistic philosophers call for ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... developing. This has given you time to think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we'd just make asses ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... until I found my travelling companions assembled and ready to depart. Scrambling hastily into the nearest motor car I shook hands with this shortish, broad-shouldered, square-jawed man and bared my head, for, so far as these great works were concerned, he was in very truth a superman. Thus I left him to oversee the building of these mighty ships, which have been and will ever be the ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... for a few minutes behind the line and then betook me to the President's library, where I spent most of the evening hearing the Postmaster General tell of the great burden that it was to have a Congress on his hands. Bernard Shaw writes of the Superman, and so does, I believe, the crazy philosopher of Germany. I was convinced last night that I had met one in ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... an instant, turning off at a sharp angle into the bushes, leading directly away from the cliff. Now the young superman of the forest summoned all his faculties. He called to his service his immense strength and agility, his extreme acuteness of sight and hearing, and his almost supernatural power of divination, the outgrowth of a body and mind so perfectly attuned ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... or so, and to enable some favorite performer to make a brief but dazzling appearance on some barely passable dramatic pretext. Miss Lillah McCarthy and I, as author and actress, have helped to make one another famous on many serious occasions, from Man and Superman to Androcles; and Mr Charles Ricketts has not disdained to snatch moments from his painting and sculpture to design some wonderful dresses for us. We three unbent as Mrs Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds and ...
— Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress • George Bernard Shaw
... himself an "immoralist." He despises man as he is, and hails the "Superman," a creature inspired by the "will to have power" and free from all moral prejudices, including that of sympathy with the weak ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... character, too little of power; too much of self-sacrifice and too little of self-assertion; too much of right, too little of might. Conscience not only interferes with success, but also prevents the evolution of a superior type of man, that superman who is not constrained by duty nor limited by law, living his ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... Constitution was formed were Lilliputians as compared with the Brobdingnagians of our day, when man outflies the eagle, outswims the fish, and by his conquest and utilization of the invisible forces of nature has become the superman; and yet the Constitution of 1787 is, in most of its essential principles, still the Constitution of 1922. This surely marks it as a marvel in statecraft and can only be explained by the fact that the Constitution was developed by a people who, as "children brave and free of the great mother-tongue," ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... impact of the Grass was more overt. On the comicpage, Superman daily pushed it back and there was great regret his activities were limited to a fourcolor process, while Terry Lee and Flash Gordon, everinspirited by the sharp outlines of mammaryglands, also saved the country. Even Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith battled the vegetation ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... has glamor and beauty and it is told with an easy confidence. As for Blood himself, he is a superman, compounded of a sardonic humor, cold nerves, and hot temper. Both the story and the man are masterpieces. A great figure, a great ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... prostitutes without the wicked rich! But as he ages, as the bitter days Approach with perorations: O ye vipers, The engine in him changes all the world, Reverses all the wheels of thought behind. For Nietzsche comes, and makes him superman. He dumps the truth of Jesus over—there It lies with his youth's textual skepticism, ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... is endless. Be in hope. All stars are gathered in his horoscope. The brute man of the planet, he will pass, Blown out like forms of vapor on a glass. And from this quaking pulp of life will rise The superman, child of the higher skies. Immortal, he will break the ancient bars, Laugh and reach out his hands among the ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... ride! Charge, Turcos, charge! The fateful hour has come. Let all the guns of Britain roar or be forever dumb. The Superman has burst his bonds. With Kultur-flag unfurled And prayer on lip he runs amuck, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke |
