I had rather believe all the fables in the legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.9,'Of  Atheism'.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

-Berger,John Peter
  Pig Earth,'Historical  Afterward'.

Today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that isthefact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.

-Du Bois,W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)
Preface to reprint of  The Souls of Black Folk (1969).

He must teach himself that the basest of all things isto be afraid and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop foranything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomedölove and honour and pityand compassion and sacrifice.

-Faulkner,William Harrison
  Nobel prize acceptance speech.

   Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

-Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer
  Joseph Conrad,  a Personal Remembrance, pt.1.

   You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. I offer that as a universal test of travel; boredom, called byanyother name, iswhy you yearn for the first available transport out.But what bores whom?† The threshold of boredom must be like the threshold of pain, different in all of us.

-Gellhorn, Martha Ellis
  Travels with Myself and  Another.

Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.

-Illich, Ivan
  Celebration of  Awareness, ch.12.

Ich solle niemals anders verfahren, als so, dass ich auch wollen k o« nne, meine Maxime solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden. I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

-Kant, Immanuel
  Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork to a Metaphysic of Morals), ch.1 (translated by H  J Paton).

'He never listens' is universal in the institution of marriage.

-Mackaye, Dorothy Disney
Recalled on her death, 5 Sep1992.

There are three universal languages: love, music and sports.

-Moses, Ed
  In the Boston Herald,12 May.

All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.

-Pareto,Vilfredo
Quoted in Arthur Livingstone (ed) The Mind and Society (1935).

All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear,'Whatever Is, is.'

-Pope, Alexander
RIGHT1733  An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.289^94.

Lo! thy dread empire,Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.

-Pope, Alexander
  The Dunciad, bk.4, l.653^6.

Thankstohis bodily formand thankstohismind, [man] is a universal machine, capable of an infinite diversity of movement.

-Redtenbacher, Ferdinand
  Resultate fur den Maschinenbau (published1848).

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

-Sarton, May
Quoted in Encore: A Journal of the 80thYear (1993).

As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  The Statue. Man and Superman, act 3.

   Photography was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions ofthe everydayness of lifeöas a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.

-Steichen, Edward Jean
Quoted in Dialogue, May1989.

But we grow old, Ah! when shall all men's good Be each man's rule, and universal peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Through all the circle of the golden year.

-Tennyson
  'The GoldenYear', l.47^51.

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power stations. I hope that, encouraged now as patriotism, it may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal.

-Tolkien,J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel)
  Letter to ChristopherTolkien, 29 Apr.

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

-Trillin, Calvin Marshall
  The Liberal Imagination,'Art and Neurosis'.