“At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool.”

—  Menander

Those Offered for Sale, fragment 421.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Oct. 2, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "At times discretion should be thrown aside, and with the foolish we should play the fool." by Menander?
Menander photo
Menander 18
Athenian playwright of New Comedy -342–-291 BC

Related quotes

Dorothy Parker photo

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Quoted in The Algonquin Wits (1968) edited by Robert E. Drennan, and The Dispatch http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=r04cAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WFEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7250,5269688&dq=aside-lightly+dorothy-parker&hl=en (October 1962). As noted at Snopes, Drennan's source seems to be a Parker review which does not seem to contain this quote. If Parker wrote this statement anywhere the primary source seems to have gone missing.
The earliest attribution of this quote was published in the February 1960 Readers' Digest, and credited to a book review by Sid Ziff in the Los Angeles Mirror-News, which existed from 1955 to 1960. This is a little odd, considering that Sid Ziff was a sports columnist; the reference in Readers' Digest has been confirmed but the quote from the Mirror-News has not - see Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/26/great-force/#more-5787 for details.
Misattributed

“Foolish: It's all foolish. Life is a farce— a stupid, sickening farce played out by fools.”

Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 16

Mahela Jayawardene photo

“We should not play like Australia or India or England — we should play like Sri Lanka.”

Mahela Jayawardene (1977) Former Sri Lankan cricketer

Quoted in Charlie Austin, " Mahela Jayawardene http://www.cricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/287060.html," Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (2007).
Quote

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Aron Ra photo
Baba Hari Dass photo

“Without watching ourselves we can't be aware of the tricks the mind plays. So a yogi should be alert all the time.”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Source: Silence Speaks, from the chalkboard of Baba Hari Dass, 1977, p.11

Diane Abbott photo

“White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game.”

Diane Abbott (1953) British Labour Party politician

Twitter post reproduced in Daily Telegraph, 5 Jan 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/8994068/Diane-Abbott-White-people-love-playing-divide-and-rule.html
2010s, 2012

Robert Jordan photo

“In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes.”

Thom Merrilin
(15 January 1990)
Source: To the Blight

Mahatma Gandhi photo

“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi, June 1946, in an interview with Louis Fischer. Rabbi Stephen Pearce, Torah Offers Ethics, rules, so all is fair in love and war, September 2000, http://www.jewishsf.com/bk000901/torah.shtml . Quoted from Hinduism and Judaism compilation https://web.archive.org/web/20060423090103/http://www.nhsf.org.uk/images/stories/HinduDharma/Interfaith/hinduzion.pdf The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) by Louis Fischer. The quote is in the context of Gandhi's argument to his biographer that collective suicide would have been a heroic response that would have "aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence".
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

Alfred Noyes photo

Related topics