
“… we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.”
Source: Complete Poems
“… we
do not admire what
we cannot understand.”
Source: Complete Poems
“You always admire what you really don't understand.”
“You always admire what you really don't understand.”
“It is inherent to the human condition to admire precisely what you do not understand.”
Bayard vs. Lionheart, The Evening Sun, Baltimore (26 July 1920), newspapers.com/clip https://www.newspapers.com/clip/21831908/hl_mencken_article_26_jul_1920_the/
1920s
Context: All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or count himself lost. … All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
“Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.”
Act IV, scene iii
Love for Love (1695)
"Leonard Nimoy's Confessions About His Emotions", TV And Movie Play magazine (1967)
“Haters are confused admirers who can’t understand why everybody else likes you”
Variant: Haters are confused admirers who want to be like you.