A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back - it is already so far.
Alice Meynell

A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.
Arthur Conan Doyle

A Country is not a mere territory; the particular territory is only its foundation. The Country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.
Giuseppe Mazzini

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
Richard Schickel

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
Walter Scott

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
Robertson Davies

A mere copier of nature can never produce anything great.
Joshua Reynolds

A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.
Newt Gingrich

A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not give rise to probable cause to search that person.
Potter Stewart

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.
Arthur Symons

A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. His is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but it is He Himself we have.
Dwight L. Moody

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.
Charles Darwin

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.
Marie Curie

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.
Socrates

After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn't mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It's a dogma which o-ne is supposed to accept without question.
Stephen Harper

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.
Mohandas Gandhi

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.
Jack Bowman

All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.
Andrew Jackson

And let a scholar all earth's volumes carry, he will be but a walking dictionary: a mere articulate clock.
George Chapman