These mercenary quotes will inspire you. A mercenary, sometimes known as a soldier of fortune, is an individual, particularly a soldier, who takes part in military conflict for personal profit, is otherwise an outsider to the conflict, and is not a member of any other official military.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging mercenary quotes, mercenary sayings, and mercenary proverbs.
Best Mercenary Quotes
- “If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it.” ~ Howard Tayler
- “It sounds mercenary and it smacks of rats leaving the sinking ship. But get real, when everyone is bailing out, you don’t want to be the last man standing.” ~ Robbie Fowler
- “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.” ~ Maureen O’Hara
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“I never tried to be a mercenary or a killer but a hard working fighter.” ~ Larry Holmes
- “Players aren’t quite as mercenary as people make them out to be. Some of them are but some aren’t.” ~ David Gill
- “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.” ~ Alma Gluck
- “Maxim 3: An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries” ~ Howard Tayler
- “That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“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.” ~ David Johansen
- “A true warrior can only serve others, not himself…When you become a mercenary, you’re just a bully with a gun.” ~ Evan Wright
- “I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.” ~ Barry Eisler
- “Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “You can call me mercenary, or call me madam, but, as I always tell my customers – just call me anytime!” ~ Xaviera Hollander
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“The only way out is through.” ~ Robert Frost
- “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.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “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.” ~ Leo Tolstoy
- “Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.” ~ George Washington
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“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.” ~ Joseph Pulitzer
- “Maxim 20: If you’re not willing to shell your own position, you’re not willing to win. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries” ~ Howard Tayler
- “When I was a screenwriter, I was doing it for mercenary reasons.” ~ James Frey
- “When the going gets tough, the tough reinvent.” ~ RuPaul
- “What I do for a living is somewhat like mercenary prostitution. I spend a lot of energy trying to find games to bring to alternate platforms, like Linux and MacOS, and in my free time, I work on various open source projects, and other freebies like that. So I guess I’m a hooker with a heart of gold, sorta.” ~ Ryan C. Gordon
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“It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Pro basketball is a very mercenary endeavor.” ~ Rick Majerus
- “Vertue flies from the heart of a Mercenary man.” ~ George Herbert
- “When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.” ~ Bill Moyers
- “In a culture where the possibility of wealth and the acquisition of things is so defining of success, we end up pursuing things that, even if we are successful, can never deliver what we envisioned they would. The reason riches become such a snare is because we end up evaluating life in mercenary terms and being seen by others in such terms, and life is just not so.” ~ Ravi Zacharias
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“The requisitions of the income tax have added greatly to the attractions of mercenary crime.” ~ Rex Stout
- “There are people we treat wrong and later we’re prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out – surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people.” ~ Curtis Sittenfeld
- “All flatterers are mercenary, and all low-minded men are flatterers.” ~ Aristotle
- “Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.” ~ Moliere
- “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.” ~ Laurell K. Hamilton
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
- “The mercenary finished his coffee in a single gulp, It must have been piping hot, too. Boy, he was tough.” ~ Jonathan Stroud
- “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.” ~ Robert Barron
- “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.” ~ Eleanor Clift
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“The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “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?'” ~ Mike Rowe
- “As for my family, my father was Danel; he died as a mercenary in the southern wars,” Han went on. “My mother’s name was Sarah, called Sali, and my sister was Mari. They died last summer. But then, you already knew that. Every time you forget, I’ll remind you. That’s the blood sacrifice I made to be here, and that’s enough.” ~ Cinda Williams Chima
- “Servile, and base, and mercenary, is the notion of Christian practice among the bulk of nominal Christians. They give no more than they dare not with-hold; they abstain from nothing but what they must not practise.” ~ William Wilberforce
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“You really turning mercenary on your favorite older brother? (Dev) No. I would never do that to Alain. (Aimee) Ouch! Bearswan got ‘tude. (Dev)” ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon
- “New York is the city of privilege. Here is the seat of the Invisible Power represented by the allied forces of finance and industry. This Invisible Government is reactionary, sinister, unscrupulous, mercenary, and sordid. It is wanting in national ideals and devoid of conscience… This kind of government must be scourged and destroyed.” ~ William Jennings Bryan
- “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.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “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.” ~ Azar Nafisi
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“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.” ~ Nora Roberts
- “Bourgeois patriotism, as I view it, is only a very shabby, very narrow, very mercenary, and deeply antihuman passion, having for its object the preservation and maintenance of the power of the national state-that is, the mainstay of all the priveleges of the exploiters throughout the nation.” ~ Mikhail Bakunin
- “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.” ~ A. E. Housman
- “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.” ~ A. E. Housman
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“I’m like this mercenary actor going from show to show – people love to hire me, but then don’t want me around much.” ~ Sebastian Roche
- “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.” ~ Horace Walpole
- “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?” ~ Voltaire
- “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?” ~ B. C. Forbes
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“When I said “the pocket of the banks,” it is not necessarily a mercenary relationship. It is a mindset.” ~ Joseph Stiglitz
- “”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.”” ~ Charles Dickens
- “I do not say that all lawyers are bad, but I do maintain that the general tendency is bad: standing up in a court for whichever side has paid you, affecting warmth and conviction, and doing everything you can to win the case, whatever your private opinion may be, will soon dull any fine sense of honour. The mercenary soldier is not a valued creature, but at least he risks his life, whereas these men merely risk their next fee.” ~ Patrick O’Brian , Mercenary quotes soldier
- “That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature; honour and religion.” ~ Edward Gibbon
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“Nature will not be conquered, but gives herself freely to her true lover – to him who revels with her, bathes in her seas, sails her rivers, camps in her woods, and with no mercenary ends, accepts all.” ~ John Burroughs
- “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.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio
- “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.” ~ Francis Quarles
- “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.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “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.” ~ Robert M. Sapolsky
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“There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of personal conduct.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “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.” ~ James Whitbread Lee Glaisher
- “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].” ~ Patrick Heusinger
- “(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it’s the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.” ~ Amitav Ghosh
