“If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.”
E. Payne, trans., vol. 2, p. 230
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)
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Arthur Schopenhauer261
German philosopher 1788–1860Related quotes
Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist
"Purely Personal Prejudices" http://books.google.com/books?id=DLcEAQAAIAAJ&q=%22A+person+who+is+going+to+commit+an+inhuman+act+invariably+excuses+himself++to+himself+by+saying+I'm+only+human+after+all%22&pg=PA232#v=onepage <br class="br">Strictly Personal (1953)
“Excuse our appearances. We are taking apart yesterday, to make way for tomorrow”
Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist
Source: Perfect Fifths
“Anonymity is no excuse for stupidity.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
c. 1948, p. 54
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
“We have no time for excuses.”
Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon
Source: Think Big (1996), p. 80
“Yea, Custance, better (they say) a bad excuse than none.”
Nicholas Udall Ralph Roister Doister
Gawin Goodluck, Act V, sc. ii.
Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553)
Auberon Herbert (1838–1906) British politician
The Contemporary Review
Context: If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force. Force is the very weakest and most treacherous of all human implements. The history of force is the history of the continuous crumbling away of every institution that has rested upon it. — The Contemporary Review, The Ethics of Dynamite (1894)
