“Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment.”
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)
Quoted in David G. Plotkin (1955), Dictionary of American Maxims.
Attributed
“Fear is an insidious and deadly thing. It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. Worse, it's contagious.”
Last update June 3, 2021. History
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Jimmy Stewart11
American film and stage actor 1908–1997Related quotes
“There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.”
Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman
Attributed
George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator
Book XXIV, line 494, p. 336
The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (1611)
“A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic
"Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/aremoviespieces.html (December 1964), from I Lost It at the Movies (1965).
“A valiant mind no deadly danger fears;”
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era
From Reason and Affection. First published in Paradyse of Dainty Devices (1576), revised in the 1596 edition. It is also known as "Being in Love he complaineth". Published by Grosart in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies' Library, Vol. IV (1872)
Poems
Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge
Conditions of Progress in Democratic Government (1909).
Context: No greater mistake can be made than to think that our institutions are fixed or may not be changed for the worse. … Increasing prosperity tends to breed indifference and to corrupt moral soundness. Glaring inequalities in condition create discontent and strain the democratic relation. The vicious are the willing, and the ignorant are unconscious instruments of political artifice. Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses... The peril of this Nation is not in any foreign foe! We, the people, are its power, its peril, and its hope!
“That's the thing about L. A.- you can freeze to death under a rosebush, Richard says.”
A. M. Homes (1961) novelist and memoirst from the United States
Source: This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), P. 311.
The quote is mistakenly attributed to the author
“It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838) French diplomat
C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.
Reaction to the 1804 drumhead trial and execution of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, on orders of Napoleon. Actually said by either Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, legislative deputy from Meurthe (according to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations) or Joseph Fouché, Napoleon's chief of police (according to John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), http://www.bartleby.com/100/758.1.html).
Misattributed
“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”
Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again
Source: You Can't Go Home Again