Our greatest
stupidities may be very wise.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde
The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he
always gives himself for doing them.
Oscar Wilde
When the balance is broken
then everything includes itself in power, power into will, will into appetite. So
appetite, aided by will and power, becomes a universal wolf, at last eating up itself.
Carl William Brown
Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education
positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so
even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would
call stupidity.
G. C. Lichtenberg
To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the
contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime. To be considered stupid and to be told so
is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy,
cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its
ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.
Primo Levi
Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.
Karl Kraus
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of
forcing anything into an empty head.
Eric Hoffer
No man is an Island, entire of
itself, every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main....any man's death
diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee!
John Donne
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an
idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
William Hazlitt
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
Paul Gauguin
Hail Horrors! hail Infernal World!
and thou, profoundest Hell, Receive thy new Possessor-one who brings A mind not to be
changed by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make
a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, and what I
should be, all but less than He; whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be
free; the Almighty hath not built here for His envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may
reign secure; and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to
reign in Hell than serve in Heaven....
John Milton
The question now is: Can we understand our
stupidity? This is a test of intellect, not of character.
John King Fairbank
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the
key to all ages is—Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times,
and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and
fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Cardinal is at his wit’s end—it is true that he had not far to go.
Lord Byron
It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle.
But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no
advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who
have had all the advantages?
William Booth
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VISIT OUR SHAKESPEARE
QUOTATION DICTIONARY
The good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take, who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
William Wordsworth
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
Simone Weil
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no
possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does
not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either a
saint or a mediocrity.
Simone Weil
Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age
have enjoyed at the head of a school.
Horace Walpole
Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I
would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic
certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents’ birthdays.
Stephen Vizinczey
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
Gloria Steinem
You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them.
But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your
power—he’s free again.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk
nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
George Bernard Shaw
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
William Shakespeare
Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not?
It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or
you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it
is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will
act.
Olive Schreiner
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is
the fundamental concept in physics.
Bertrand Russell
The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.
Jean Rostand
All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained
thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to
cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he
that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.
Sir Walter Ralegh
A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.
Publilius Syrus
Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the
belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always
seem to be invincible.
George Orwell
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell
Not necessity, not desire—no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have
everything—health, food, a place to live, entertainment—they are and remain
unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his
violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Mao Zedong
Power? It’s like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
Harold Macmillan
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation.
To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only
a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery;
to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is
cowardly.
Jean de La Bruyère
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power
the greater it will be.
Thomas Jefferson
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come
true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
Eric Hoffer
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the
powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided
by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
Václav Havel
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or
the image of a gun.
Jean Genet
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are
endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a
particular society.
Michel Foucault
All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be
traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
Andrea Dworkin
Power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the People.
Benjamin Disraeli
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to
assert itself in trifles.
Charles Horton Cooley
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars
who quickly learn to despise popes.
Albert Camus
Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument
from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be
distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power
for their relief.
Edmund Burke
Books are not absolutely dead
things, but do contain a potency of life in them....I know they are as lively and as
vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth and being sown up and down, may
chance to spring up armed men.
John Milton
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of
repulsion. It’s very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal
embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it
acquired its historically sacred character.
Jean Baudrillard
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its
recipient.
Roland Barthes
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power
without morality is no longer power.
James Baldwin
It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others,
and to lose power over a man’s self.
Francis Bacon
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself
would be enough to make me ambitious.
Ernest Renan
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history
mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands
in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the
wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform
any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the
ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in
a democracy the whores are us.
P. J. O’Rourke
Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Authority is not a quality one person has, in the sense that he has property or physical
qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon
another as somebody superior to him.
Erich Fromm
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
Charles de Gaulle
Who kills a man kills a reasonable
creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kill reason itself, kills the
image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good
book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose
to a life beyond life. (from Areopagitica)
John Milton
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In
the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.
Mikhail Bakunin
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and
exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish
the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.
Mikhail Bakunin
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and
exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison
No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of
the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better.
Sir Robert Giffen
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.
George Bernard Shaw
No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society
destroys it.
George Bernard Shaw
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of
it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our
circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.
George Bernard Shaw
The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to
fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.
George Bernard Shaw
No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and
fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a
commercial civilization.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be
the same.
George Bernard Shaw
If you visit this multiple blog you will be able
to find a lot of C.W. Brown quotations in English!
If you visit this multiple blog you will be able
to find a lot of C.W. Brown quotations in English!
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of
functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
George Bernard Shaw
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
A fool's brain digest philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into
pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is
more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or
morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is
invested with the approval of society.
George Bernard Shaw
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him
he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw
Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
George Bernard Shaw
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered
on the subject.
George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity
of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
George Bernard Shaw
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from
neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
George Bernard Shaw
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and
unhappiness.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the
crimes.
George Bernard Shaw
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten
material.
George Bernard Shaw
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops
dare not denounce it fundamentally.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty:
what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.
George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw
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