“A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”

— Harper Lee, book Go Set a Watchman

Source: Go Set a Watchman

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them." by Harper Lee?

Harper Lee photo

Harper Lee142

American author 1926–2016

Related quotes

“No man is the wiser for his learning.”

John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law

Learning.
Table Talk (1689)

“No man can justly censure or condemn another, because indeed no man truly knows another.”

Thomas Browne book Religio Medici

Section 4
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

“Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.”

Lawrence Durrell book Balthazar

Source: Balthazar

“A wise man distrusts his neighbor. A wiser man distrusts both his neighbor and himself. The wisest man of all distrusts his government.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

The Devil's Advocate (1952)
1950s

“His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.”

Patricia Briggs book Hunting Ground

Source: Hunting Ground

“Some men are much better and wiser than others, but experience seems to show that hardly any man is so much better than or wiser than others that he can permanently stand the test of irresponsible power over them.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter IX, The Future Of Liberalism, p. 118.

“Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Source: Love Bites

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

Marilynne Robinson Gilead

Source: Gilead

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“And you know, I agree to everything:
I will condemn, I will forget, I will give comfort to the enemy,
Darkness will be light and sin lovely.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Source: The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Related topics