“Pride in boasting of family antiquity, makes duration stand for merit.”
John Zimmerman
“Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in”
Mark Twain
“Wanting to work is so rare a merit that it should be encouraged.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats' teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
