“People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.”

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world." by Tzvetan Todorov?
Tzvetan Todorov photo
Tzvetan Todorov 9
Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary cr… 1939–2017

Related quotes

Tzvetan Todorov photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic

Leonard Mlodinow photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)

John Danforth photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Michael Crichton photo

“The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)
Context: The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

Will Cuppy photo

“They [the Pilgrim Fathers] believed in freedom of thought for themselves and for all other people who believed exactly as they did.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Miles Standish

Peter Ackroyd photo

“I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.”

Pages 128-9.
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983)

Related topics