“Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.”
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Niccolo Machiavelli 130
Italian politician, Writer and Author 1469–1527Related quotes

“Wave Mechanics,” p. 75
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Part I, Essay 4: Of The First Principles of Government
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Context: Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.

On Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1831)

A variant — "Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared" — appears in The Irish Beekeeper, v.19-20, 1965-66, p74, citing Abeilles et Fleurs (Bees and Flowers, the house magazine of Union Nationale de l'Apiculture Française) for June 1965. Snopes.com mentions its use in a beekeepers' protest in 1994 in Europe http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp suggesting invention and attribution to Einstein for political reasons.
Misattributed

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 12

§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius

“Few men think; yet all have opinions.”
Philonous to Hylas. The Second Dialogue. This appears in a passage first added in the third edition, (1734)
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713)