Quotes about fools
page 14

“He is no fool who parts with that which he cannot keep, when he is sure to be recompensed with that which he cannot lose.”

Jim Elliot (1927–1956) Martyred Christian missionary to Ecuador

Quoted from The life of the Rev. Philip Henry, A.M., Matthew Henry, J. B. Williams, pub. W. Ball, 1839 p. 35 ( Google Books http://books.google.com/books?id=BUfCH_MaUS8C) Misattributed

Parting

“3570. No Fool like the old Fool.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“The monarch is a responsible person. The fact that a monarch is responsible "to God alone," rather than to an assembly or a popular majority, is rather shocking to an agnostic mind; but while God cannot be fooled, the masses can. While it is perhaps true that "one cannot fool all the people all the time," it seems one can fool millions for centuries. History abounds with such examples, especially the history of religions. In spite of the republican-democratic emphasis on "responsible government," subject to the sanction of not getting re-elected (and if being impeached only in the grossest cases of corruption), the demo-republican government nonetheless derives its authority from anonymous, secretly voting masses on a purely numerical basis. It is even impossible to trace the empowering individual; and thus we get what French authors call the "cult of irresponsibility." The electees, rejecting all responsibility, can easily blame the electors for their "mandates." Thus we get today the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the misdeeds of their rulers, regardless of whether these had majority support or not. This collective judgment of moral acts is one of the great maladies of the democratic age.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Liberty or Equality (40th anniversary edition) (1993), p. 158

God, People, Age, Religion

“If I am a fool then it is no misfortune, for then only one more fool will wander this Earth. Amongst the millions of mentally deranged it would barely be noticed. But what if I am not a fool, and that science itself has erred? Then the tragedy is incalculable!”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 51, p. 29 (Callum Coats: Water Wizard)
Implosion Magazine

Science

“Only a fool has no regrets and I'm not a fool.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview in Metro http://www.metro.co.uk/fame/interviews/article.html?in_article_id=12486&in_page_id=11, May 2, 2006

“I rely on two precedents: first, to similar cases our Sages applied the verse, "It is time to do something in honour of the Lord: for they have made void thy law"… Secondly, they have said, "Let all thy acts be guided by pure intentions."… Lastly, when I have a difficult subject before me—when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools—I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude; I prefer to extricate that intelligent man from his embarrassment and show him the cause of his perplexity, so that he may attain perfection and be at peace.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Truth, Peace, Law, Way

“Anyone who tries to predict the future is inevitably a fool. Present company included. A prophet without a sense of humor is just stupid.”

David Brin book Earth

Part III (p. 143)
Earth (1990)

Stupidity, Sense, Future

“What I am trying to do is something different — an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in The Lives of the Great Composers (1997) by Harold C. Schonberg, p. 464

World, Art, Reality

“In magic, anyone with a shop-bought trick deck is a magician, and if people aren’t fooled they usually pretend to be, and they are understandably likely to mistake being fooled as a sign of being in the presence of an excellent magician.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

People, Understanding

“Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Papal Welcome (17 July 2008)

Truth, Beauty

“He Corot was always surrounded by a crowd of fools and I didn't want to get caught up in it. I admired him from a distance.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 12 : Renoir's remark to Vollard referring to the pre-impressionist landscape-painter Camille Corot.

“Fools will be fools,
And wise will be wise.
But I will look this world
Straight in the eyes.What good is a man
Who won't take a stand?
What good is a cynic
With no better plan?”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Better Way.
Song lyrics, Both Sides of the Gun (2006)

World

“Simon, always a fool for simplicity, accepted. Punch took an envelope out of his pocket and scribbled on the back of it. He said, 'This has a simple arithmetical proof but no rational explanation of the paradox.' He gave it to Simon. Simon read it, looked at Punch with raised eyebrows, hunched his shoulders, shook his head sadly, and got up and left the room without a word.”

William Grey Walter (1910–1977) American-born British neuroscientist and roboticist

Source: The Curve of the Snowflake (1956), p. 72.

Reading

“My answer is that I am a Hindu and I love Hindu dharma. How can anyone destroy it? It provides happiness both in this world as well as in the other world. There is no other religion like it. Only a deranged person or a fool would leave it to become vile. Hindu dharma would remain in the world for ever. It is not going to be destroyed by your efforts.”

Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621–1675) The ninth Guru of Sikhism

Tegh Bahadur’s Hindi reply to Aurangzeb when he was asked to become a Muslim. Kshitish Vedalankar: Storm in Punjab, p.178.

Love, Happiness, World, Religion

“Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.”

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) Renaissance mathematician, Polish astronomer, physician

Part of an unsigned foreword to Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, actually written by Andreas Osiander.
Misattributed

Truth, Idea, Study

“It's so easy to fall in love — it's so easy to fall in love.
People tell me love is for fools,
So here I go breaking all of the rules.”

Buddy Holly (1936–1959) American singer-songwriter

It's So Easy, written by Buddy Holly and Norman Petty (1958)
Song lyrics, Singles

Love, People

“Fools, they do not even know how much more is the half than the whole.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 40; often translated as "The half is greater than the whole."

“The fool that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.”

George Walter Thornbury (1828–1876) British writer

The Jester’s Sermon.

“Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.”

Mark Kingwell (1963) Canadian philosopher

Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 3, Virtues And Vices, p. 77.

“A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions.”

Wilson Mizner (1876–1933) American writer

"Maxims Old and New", All of a Piece: New Essays https://books.google.com/books?id=4vEQAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22A+fellow+who+is+always+declaring+he%27s+no+fool+usually+has+his+suspicions.%22 (1937), edited by Edward Verrall Lucas, p. 52. Epigrams

“How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me.”

Joseph Heller book God Knows

God Knows (1984)

Love, Life, Men, Way

“"Some places have already quit lotteries." Mrs. Adams said.
"Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools."”

Shirley Jackson book The Lottery

The Lottery (1948)

“Yes it was 1949. How I came to that. That's like how one gets to know a human being. It so happens that I've always had a preference – as everyone has prejudices and preferences – for the square as a shape in preference to the circle as a shape. And I have known for a long time that a circle always fools me by not telling me whether it's standing still or not. And if a circle circulates you don't see it. The outer curve looks the same whether it moves or does not move. So the square is much more honest and tells me that it is sitting on one line of the four, usually a horizontal one, as a basis. And I have also come to the conclusion that the square is a human invention, which makes it sympathetic to me. Because you don't see it in nature. As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. We know this because we can see it in the microscope. On the other hand, we believe we see circles in nature. But rarely precise ones. Mature, it seems, is not a mathematician. Probably there are no straight lines either. Particularly not since Einstein says in his theory of relativity that there is no straight line, rod knows whether there are or not, I don't. I still like to believe that the square is a human invention. And that tickles me. So when I have a preference for it then I can only say excuse me.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Nature, Time

“Total actions are a further development of the happening and combine the elements of all art forms, painting music, literature, film, theatre, which have been so infected by the progressive process of cretinisation in our society that any examination of reality has become impossible using these means alone. Total actions are the unprejudiced examination of all the materials that make up reality. Total actions take place in a consciously delineated area of reality with deliberately selected materials. They are partial, dynamic occurrences in which the most varied materials and elements of reality are linked, swapped over, turn on their heads and destroyed. This procedure creates the occurrence. The actual nature of the occurrence depends on the composition of the material and actors′ unconscious tendencies. Anything may constitute the material: people, animals, plants, food, space, movement, noise, smells, light, fire, coldness, warmth, wind, dust, steam, gas, events, sport, all art forms and all art products. All the possibilities of the material are ruthlessly exhausted. As a result of the incalculable possibilities for choices that the material presents to the actor, he plunges into a concentrated whirl of action finds himself suddenly in a reality without barriers, performs actions resembling those of a madman, and avails himself of a fool′s privileges, which is probably not without significance for sensible people. Old art forms seek to reconstruct reality, total actions unfold within reality itself. Total actions are direct occurrences(direct art), not the repetition of an occurrence, a direct encounter between unconscious elements and reality(material). The actor performs and himself becomes material: stuttering, stammering, burbling, groaning, choking, shouting, screeching, laughing, spitting, biting, creeping, rolling about in the material.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 166 (1966/1972)

People, Food, Art, Music

“The English are particularised for their partiality to strange sights; uncommon beasts, birds, or fishes, are sure to attract their notice, and especially such of them as are of the monstrous kind; and this propensity of our countrymen is neatly satirised by Shakspeare in the Tempest; where Stephano, seeing Calaban lying upon the stage, and being uncertain whether he was a fish, a beast, or one of the inhabitants of the island, speaks in the following manner: "Were I in England now, as once I was, and had this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give me a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man: any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Indeed, we may observe that a cow with two heads, a pig with six legs, or any other unnatural production, with proper management, are pretty certain fortunes to the possessors.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. xlix
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Lying, Bird, Fish, Holiday

“All the years he’d spent fooling himself into thinking that what he did was correct was simply time wasted from his life, on delusions and fantasies that kept him from seeing what he was and where he was inevitably headed with genuine clarity.”

Robert Lynn Asprin (1946–2008) American science fiction and fantasy author

Source: Wagers of Sin (1996), Chapter 21 (p. 428)

Life, Thinking, Time

“In any case, the thought of a catastrophe or holocaust unleashed by accidental (i. e. nonhistorical) causes might be very unsettling to any Marxists who had a passionate belief in a deterministic theory of history. Instead of saying "It is inevitable that we will take over the world in fifty years", this Marxist would have to add, "Always assuming some capitalist fool doesn't press the button."”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

World, History, Passion

“The world is made up, for the most part, of fools and knaves, both irreconcileable foes to truth.”

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1628–1687) English statesman and poet

"Letter to Mr. Clifford, on his Human Reason"; cited from The Works of His Grace, George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham (London: T. Evans, 1770) vol. 2, p. 105.
Variant (modernized spelling): The world is made up, for the most part, of fools and knaves, both irreconcilable foes to truth.

Truth, World, Parting

“1579. Fools may invent Fashions, that wise Men will wear.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Similarly in French: Les fous inventent les modes et les sages les suivent.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Men, Fashion

“To laugh at men of sense is the privilege of fools.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Rire des gens d'esprit, c'est le privilège des sots.
56
Les Caractères (1688), De la société et de la conversation

Men, Sense

“How to be a good fellow without being a fool.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“It may be true that death is a large empty hole and that sorrow is knowing just how deep the hole is, but it is only true when one is sober. If one has snaps one can fill up the hole with all the beautiful thoughts one can think of, and all the fine words one can hit on. One can fill it right up to the brink, and then put a stone there.He loved her because she loved him, and if one is loved, one loves in return, otherwise one is a fool.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 30

Love, Death, Beauty, Thinking

“Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and even sometimes renders the most foolish man clever.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

La passion fait souvent un fou du plus habile homme, et rend souvent les plus sots habiles.
Variant translation: Passion often makes a fool of the cleverest man and often makes the most foolish men clever.
Maxim 6.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Passion

“There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before. Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case. A mathematical model was made to calculate erosion. This was a model based not on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Rogers Commission Report (1986)

Way, Confidence, Mathematics, Understanding

“It seems to me that kings — and queens — can be fools when they forget what they are and act like who they are, but they’re worse when they only remember what they are and forget who.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Nynaeve al'Meara
(15 October 1993)

Forgetting

“It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

"It Takes All Sorts" (1962)
1960s

School

“Fool, not to know that love endures no tie,
And Jove but laughs at lovers' perjury.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Palamon and Arcite, book ii, line 758.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love, Lovers

“A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 15 “To the Ice” (p. 213)

Joy

“At the invitation of Her Majesty's Government, the United States is about to station on the soil of the United Kingdom nuclear weapons which, we are told, will be used only after consultation and by joint decision with Her Majesty's Government. Anyone who, after the experience of the last few days and of recent years, imagines that the United States will defer to the views of the Government of this country is living in a dangerous fool's paradise. Anyone in office who entertains that illusion is in no position to serve the security of this country.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1983/oct/26/grenada-invasion in the House of Commons (26 October 1983) during the debate on the American invasion of Grenada. 1980s

Imagination, Decision, Country

“253. A foole knowes more in his house then a wise man in another's.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Housing

“Advertising works. Brand names are better known if advertised with sexy or alluring pictures, and better-known brands sell better. Why does it work? Because the price the consumer would have to pay in ignoring the subliminal message is just to high. Better to be fooled into buying the second best ice-cream than go to all the bother of educating yourself into the ability to resist salesmen.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 5

Education

“But in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded: if they are not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men, World, Hope, Universe

“The word "modern" no longer has an automatic prestige except among fools.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)

“I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. […] I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie.”

Frank McCourt book 'Tis

§23
'Tis (2000)

People, Books, Girl, Literature

“Thou hast confessions to listen,
And bells to christen,
And altars and dolls to dress;
And fools to coax,
And sinners to hoax,
And beads and bones to bless;
And great pardons to sell
For those who pay well,
And small ones for those who pay less.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 25. The Devil's Walk http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/devil/devil.rs1860.html (1799)

“To go beyond reason we have to climb up the ladder of reason and go to the top of it. This will not upset reason as it is interested only in assembling the facts, whatever they might be. Reason is an ever-loyal tool; imagination an ever-failing fool.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Imagination

“An old doting fool, with one foot already in the grave.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

“In this fool's paradise he drank delight.”

George Crabbe (1754–1832) English poet, surgeon, and clergyman

The Borough (1810), Letter xii, "Players".

“Of all the creatures that creep, swim, or fly,
Peopling the earth, the waters, and the sky,
From Rome to Iceland, Paris to Japan,
I really think the greatest fool is man.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

De tous les animaux qui s'élèvent dans l'air,
Qui marchent sur la terre, ou nagent dans la mer,
De Paris au Pérou, du Japon jusqu'à Rome,
Le plus sot animal, à mon avis, c'est l'homme.
Satire 8, l. 1
Satires (1716)

People, Thinking, Water, Flying

“Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Que ne sait-il choisir ses gens? La marche ordinaire du XIXe siècle est que, quand un être puissant et noble rencontre un homme de cœur, il le tue, l'exile, l'emprisonne ou l'humilie tellement, que l'autre a la sottise d'en mourir de douleur.
Vol. I, ch. XXIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Feeling

“Cause when you're a Celebrity,
It's adios reality.
You can act just like a fool.
People think you're cool
Just cause you're on TV.
I can throw major fits
When my latte isn't just how I like it.
They say I've gone insane,
I'll blame it on the fame,
And the pressures that it goes with
Being a Celebrity.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Celebrity, written by Brad Paisley.
Song lyrics, Mud on the Tires (2003)

People, Thinking, Reality

“Only fools think they’re wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

“Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night”, p. 264
The Ivory and the Horn (1996)

Thinking

“There were always people searching for the Unmaker, for some awful destructive power outside themselves. Poor fools, they always thought that Destruction was merely destruction, they were using it and when they were done with it, they’d set to building. But you don’t build on a foundation of destruction. That’s the dark secret of the Unmaker, Alvin thought. Once he sets you to tearing down, it’s hard to get back to building, hard to get your own self back. The digger wears out the ground and the spade. And once you let yourself be a tool in the Unmaker’s hand, he’ll wear you out, he’ll tear you down, he’ll dull you and hole you and all the time you’ll be thining you’re so sharp and fine and bright and whole, and you never go till he lets go of you, lets you drop and fall. What’s that clatter? Why, that was me. That was me, sounding like a wore-out tool. What you leaving me for? I still got use left in me?
But you don’t, not when the Unmaker’s got you.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Alvin Journeyman (1995), Chapter 14.

People, Secret, Search, Tear

“Shall we indict one man for making a fool of another?”

John Holt (Lord Chief Justice) (1642–1710) English lawyer and Lord Chief Justice of England

Reg. v. Jones (1703), 2 Raym. 1013.

“"What are you trying to do, Kerouac?" I'd ask myself in my sleepingbag at night, "trying to deny reality with all this Buddha stuff, ya jerk?" … "Poor detailed immaculate incarnate fool, and you call yourself Self … Take off your coat and crash wits." And I realized that all this Buddhism was a STRAIN at telling the untellable emptiness yet that nothing was truer, a perfect paradox.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Meditation in the Woods (1958)

Jerk, Reality, Perfection, Night

“And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool.”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

Commonly paraphrased as "An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations".
No. 66. (Rica writing to * * *)
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

Men, Books, Imagination, Nature

“We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy…One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn't rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant…I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media's prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

The Great Liberal Death Wish, lecture at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan, USA, March 1979. Transcript in Imprimis http://imprimisarchives.hillsdale.edu/file/archives/pdf/1979_05_Imprimis.pdf May 1979 (pdf).

Food, Way, Imagination, Boy

“I have known exile and a wild passion
Of longing changing to a cold ache.
King, beggar and fool, I have been all by turns,
Knowing the body’s sweetness, the mind’s treason;
Taliesin still, I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heart’s need.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Taliesin 1952"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

World, Beauty, Passion, Change

“All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.”

Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) English dramatist, poet and translator

Remark attributed to Marlowe from the testimony of Richard Baines, a government informer, in 1593.
Disputed

Love, Boy

“"I'm not sure I ever 'got it' when it comes to how to live my life in a way that was original and free," reflected Steven Salt, a retired businessman. "Of course, like most men, I always believed I had the answers and that I was not going to live my life the stupid way other men do. I was going to be unique and avoid their mistakes, but instead I'm just another male stereotype. I started off thinking that being an achiever and a 'winner' would be the key to real freedom. So all my energy went that way and I faked everything else when it came to caring about other people. Then I thought I'd marry the 'perfect' woman and be the 'perfect' dad and husband, not like the other married men. I'd be different. But no matter how I tried I was forcing it and probably fooling no one but myself. My wife finally left and I barely know who my kids really are. When we talk it's mainly 'business.' I fell into all the traps. Now that I'm in my seventies, I'm becoming just like all those guys I felt sorry for when I was younger— guys with no real friends and with no patience for anyone else's ideas or opinions. I can barely stand to talk to anyone and yet I'm still looking to fulfill myself by meeting the 'perfect' woman. I've become a macho cliché. It's taken me this long to realize that even if she existed I really wouldn't know how to be with her and make it feel good anyway."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Personal Journey of Masculinity: From Externalization to Disconnection to Oblivion, p. 9
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Life, Men, People, Stupidity

“The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

Experience
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Wisdom

“And only God who makes the tree
Also makes the fools like me. But only fools like me, you see,
Can make a God, who makes a tree.”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

"Atheist".
Rhymes for the Irreverent (1965)

God, Tree

“Fair, gentle friend, I’ve found so dear a home
I wish that dawn might never come again;
The loveliest lady ever born of woman
Lies in my arms, and I care not a straw
For jealous fool or dawn!”

Giraut de Bornelh (1138–1220) French writer

Bel dous companh, tan sui en ric sojorn
Qu'eu no volgra mais fos l'alba ni jorn,
Car la gensor que anc nasques de maire
Tenc et abras, per qu'eu non prezi gaire
Lo fol gilos ni l'alba.
"Reis glorios", line 31; translation from Peter Dronke The Medieval Lyric (1996) p. 176.

Home

“[Gladio] had been founded in almost all the Countries that belonged to the Nato, and for Nato's wish, aware that its European partners would not have been able to withstand the attack of a much power armed as the Soviet union: they would have to wait for the rescue, the intervention of America. It's demonstrated by the fact that when this plan was revealed, no other country found nothing to say. Only we Italians – the usual idiots and fools novelists – made it the subject of scandal and pretext of «Crime fictions» that still find credit, as this letter shows. I also feel shocked, and bit offended. But just because no one has called me for adherence to Gladio: I would have given it with enthusiasm.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Corriere della Sera http://web.archive.org/web/20151108234947/http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/1997/luglio/06/Caso_Moro_non_piu_nulla_co_0_9707062761.shtml, 7 June 1997, p. 35. 1950s - 1990s

Feeling, Waiting, Country

“How short life is for fools.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, The Crystal City (2003), Chapter 8 “Plans” (p. 159).

Life

“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

Quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom‎ (1958) by Herbert Victor Prochnow, p. 129

People, Drink

“You are one of those obsessed demoniacal creatures who ought to be avoided at all costs; they bring misfortune into the lives of others; they ruin the lives of others. The real good people are humble and silent (like your Kitty is). But beware, God sees all vanity and pride and you cannot fool him.”

Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011) daughter of Joseph Stalin

Said to Malcolm Muggeridge, as quoted in Richard Ingrams (1996), Muggeridge: The Biography, p. 233

God, People

“But this time, and particularly in front of this crowd, it felt far more urgent to point out the hypocrisy of our side. How can conservative women hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man (Roy Moore) credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate? I watched my fellow panelists’ eyes widen. And then the booing began. I’d been dreading it for days, but when it came, I almost welcomed it. There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth. And it must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability. I spoke to a hostile audience for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years. Just hearing the words you know are true can serve as ballast, steadying your mind when so much seems unreal.”

Mona Charen (1957) political writer

I'm Glad I Got Booed at CPAC (2018)

Women, Hostility, Truth, Hope

“You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by transformation.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Hope, Disappointment

“Johnson: What do you think about this Vietnam thing? I’d like to hear you talk a little bit.
Russell: Well, frankly, Mr. President, it’s the damn worse mess that I ever saw, and I don’t like to brag and I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew that we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don’t see it. I just don’t know what to do.
Johnson: Well, that’s the way I have been feeling for six months.
Russell: Our position is deteriorating and it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less they are willing to do for themselves. It is a mess and it’s going to get worse, and I don’t know how or what to do. I don’t think the American people are quite ready for us to send our troops in there to do the fighting. If I was going to get out, I’d get the same crowd that got rid of old Diem [the Vietnamese prime minister who was overthrown and assassinated in 1963] to get rid of these people and to get some fellow in there that said we wish to hell we would get out. That would give us a good excuse for getting out.
Johnson: How important is it to us?
Russell: It isn’t important a damn bit for all this new missile stuff.
Johnson: I guess it is important.
Russell: From a psychological standpoint. Other than the question of our word and saving face, that’s the reason that I said that I don’t think that anybody would expect us to stay in there. It’s going to be a headache to anybody that tries to fool with it. You’ve got all the brains in the country, Mr. President—you better get ahold of them. I don’t know what to do about this. I saw it all coming on, but that don’t do any good now, that’s water over the dam and under the bridge. And we are there.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Telephone call with Senator Richard Russell (May 27, 1964)

Life, War, People, Way

“This is the greatest political question of our time. How can we put an end to the empire of mega-corporations and restore democracy? If I knew I would be the savior of the world. What I think I can tell is that the media are crucial. The power of the corporate media enables truth to be suppressed and lies to be passed as truth. You probably heard that a half-truth can be worse than a lie. A lot of the things that our governments and media saying are 1/10 truths, 9/10 lies. And it doesn't take very many of them together to create a completely fictional world view (like the one that Bush presents when he talks). So I recommend that people stop listening to the mainstream media. Don't watch television news. Don't listen the news on radio. Don't read news from ordinary newspapers. Get it from variety of web sites which are not operated under the power of business money and you'll have better chance of not being fooled by the systematic lies that they all tell, because they're all paid by the same people to tell the same lies or 9/10 lies.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, What is free software? (2006)

Money, People, Truth, Lie

“I took that opportunity to tell him something that, er, I had long thought of telling somebody that was about to enter the world of really high secrecy. And I said, 'Henry, you're about to get a lot of clearence higher than top secret that you did not know existed. That's going to have a sequence of effects on you. First, a great exhileration that you're getting all this amazing information that you didn't know even existed. And the next phase is you'll feel like a fool for not having known about any of this. but that won't last long. Fairly soon, you'll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening to them.”

Daniel Ellsberg (1931) American economist and whistleblower

On talking to Henry Kissinger about the effects of gaining high security clearence after Kissinger's first National Security Council with then president Nixon. 'The Most Dangerous Man in America - Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers' 2009 Documentary.

Secret, World, Feeling, Thinking