
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Variant: It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Source: Heir to the Shadows
“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Variant: It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
“4833. The wise Man draws more Advantage from his Enemies, than a Fool from his Friends.”
Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1749) : The wise Man draws more Advantage from his Enemies, than the Fool from his Friends.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
The Fourfold Treasure (1871) No. 991 http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0991.htm
“Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain — and most fools do.”
Attributed in various post-2000 works, but actually Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People p.14 http://books.google.com/books?id=yxfJDVXClucC&pg=PA14&dq=fool, published in 1936. (N.B. Carnegie is quoting Franklin immediately prior to writing this, so attribution could be due to a printing error in some edition).
Misattributed
“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.”
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Context: Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the hydrostatic paradox of controversy?
Don't know what it means? - Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, — and the fools know it.
“I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.”
Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)