Preface to The Practice of Prelates (1531).
Context: Take heed, therefore, wicked prelates, blind leaders of the blind; indurate and obstinate hypocrites, take heed …. Ye will be the chiefest in Christ's flock, and yet will not keep one jot of the right way of his doctrine …ye keep thereof almost naught at all, but whatsoever soundeth to make of your bellies, to maintain your honour, whether in the Scripture, or in your own traditions, or in the pope's law, that ye compel the lay-people to observe; violently threatening them with your excommunications and curses, that they shall be damned, body and soul, if they keep them not. And if that help you not, then ye murder them mercilessly with the sword of the temporal powers, whom ye have made so blind that they be ready to slay whom ye command, and will not hear his cause examined, nor give him room to answer for himself.
“Blind counsels of the wicked! Crime cowardly ever!”
O caeca nocentum
consilia! o semper timidum scelus!
Source: Thebaid, Book II, Line 489
“This is why you shouldn't fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.”
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
“He was their leader because he was a man on whom the blinding light sometimes descended.”
Source: Space Chantey (1968), Ch. 6
Context: Something was working in Roadstrum's little ape head. When he had been a man he had always known when it was time for action; particularly he had always known the last moment when action was still possible. He knew now that that moment was come very near. … Then a blinding light burst upon Roadstrum, and he saw the truth of the situation. Many things Roadstrum was not, and it was sometimes wondered why he was the natural leader of all the men. He was their leader because he was a man on whom the blinding light sometimes descended.
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.”
Helena, Act I, scene i.
Variant: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind".
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
“Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is therefore always represented as blind.”
No. 99.
The Guardian (1713)
The Anti-Communist Impulse http://books.google.com/books?id=i6V2AAAAMAAJ&q=%22Our+fear+that+Communism+might+someday+take+over+most+of+the+world+blinds+us+to+the+fact+that+anti-communism+already+has%22&pg=PA4#v=onepage (1970)
Tom Tancredo to Juanita Millender-MacDonald http://tancredo.house.gov/media/2007.01.25%20Tancredo%20to%20House%20Administration.pdf. (January 25, 2007).
