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A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.
Sep 10, 2025
When I said "the pocket of the banks," it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.
I'm like this mercenary actor going from show to show - people love to hire me, but then don't want me around much.
The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.
Vertue flies from the heart of a Mercenary man.
When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.
It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured in money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Music is my love and to me acting is more mercenary. I don't pound the pavements for roles: if it happens, it happens. I hate that auditioning thing.
Inspired by the purse rather than the soul, the mercenary side fairly screams in many of the works put out by every day American publishers.
Players aren't quite as mercenary as people make them out to be. Some of them are but some aren't.
She could and had faced an armed laser in the hands of a mad mutant mercenary with less fear than she faced such unswerving emotion.
Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.
Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.
I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter.
I like the desperado aspect of essays, the free lance, that mercenary kind of thing, so I just do it, without asking anyone's permission. I've never written a query letter, I don't pitch pieces, I have no market in mind, I don't spend any time trying to figure out where I might fit in.
Many men who do creditable things refuse to let it be known. This is a mistake. While we all admire modesty, nevertheless there is a great national need to do everything possible to bring home to the rank and file of the people that all employers and all wealthy men are not grinding, mercenary, selfish skinflints, but that many of them take delight in doing helpful things for others ... Shortcomings of employers are constantly paraded. Why not let the public become acquainted with the better side which most present-day employers possess?
I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.
Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together," Pulitzer wrote. "An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.
A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.
So many of us had been armed that there were holsters and weapons scattered among the passed-out bodies like mercenary prizes in a fleshy Cracker Jack box.
Money is both the generation and corruption of purchased honor; honor is both the child and slave of potent money: the credit which honor hath lost, money hath found. When honor grew mercenary, money grew honorable. The way to be truly noble is to contemn both.
The Bible constantly warns against a merely mercenary relationship with God - a friendship of convenience or self-interest. We should not love God simply because doing so will produce many consolations in our life. We must enter a true relationship, were we fall in love not with His benefits, but with Him.
Of all sorts of flattery, that which comes from a solemn character and stands before a sermon is the worst-complexioned. Such commendation is a satire upon the author, makes the text look mercenary, and disables the discourse from doing service.
The mercenary finished his coffee in a single gulp, It must have been piping hot, too. Boy, he was tough.
Mithridates, he died old. Housman's passage is based on the belief of the ancients that Mithridates the Great [c. 135-63 B.C.] had so saturated his body with poisons that none could injure him. When captured by the Romans he tried in vain to poison himself, then ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him.
We are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that the mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.
Most of the things I do brand wise are both missionary and mercenary in their position, and that's really important to me; that's one of the first things I look at when I say, 'does it make sense to do a deal?'
The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people’s actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.
The gigantic challenge is the magnitude of the individual differences in the optimal set point for "good stress." For one person, it's doing something risky with your bishop in a chess game; for someone else, it's becoming a mercenary in Yemen.
"A child!" said Edith, looking at her. "When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight."
When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.
When the going gets tough, the tough eat ribs.
When the going gets tough, the tough go drinking.
When the going gets tough, the tough take a nap.
When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.
These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead. The British regulars who made the retreat from Mons, beginning August 24, 1914.
The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.
If there are atheists, who is to be blamed if not the mercenary tyrants of souls who, in revolting us against their swindles, compel some feeble spirits to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?
But I think what we're coming to grips with is the fact that we actually have a mercenary Army, and it doesn't have a nice ring to it. We call it 'volunteers', but we're basically paying people to serve their country. And if you're going to pay people and have a mercenary Army, you're going to have to pay the market rate. And so the bounties are going up—more money for tuition, higher enlistment bonuses—and I think it's appropriate.
The only way out is through.
My character is called The Hunter. He's the main antagonist in the movie. In a nutshell, he's a slightly deranged natural born killer who's weirdly determined to succeed at his job, whatever his employment is. He's a mercenary and there's a high body count for him in this film [Never Go Back].
South Africa, with US support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent-it was a psychic shock-white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa.
Three classes inhabited the city (Alexandria in Egypt): first the Aegyptian or native stock of people, who were quick-tempered and not inclined to civil life; and secondly the mercenary class, who were severe and numerous and intractable...; and, third, the tribe of the Alexandrians, who also were not distinctly inclined to civil life, and for the same reasons, but still they were better than those others, for even though they were a mixed people, still they were Greeks by origin and mindful of the customs common to the Greeks.
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.
When the going gets tough, the tough reinvent.
The passions seldom give good advice but to the interested and mercenary. Resentment generally suggests bad measures. Second thoughts and good nature will rarely, very rarely, approve the first hints of anger.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.
Pure mathematics offers no mercenary inducements to its followers, who is attracted to it by the importance and beauty of the truths in contains; and the complete absence of any material advantage to be gained by means of it, adds perhaps another charm to its study.
We view ourselves on the eve of battle. We are nerved for the contest, and must conquer or perish. It is vain to look for present aid: none is at hand. We must now act or abandon all hope! Rally to the standard, and be no longer the scoff of mercenary tongues! Be men, be free men, that your children may bless their father's name.