“O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.”

— W.B. Yeats , book The Tower

I, st. 2
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "O what fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out." by W.B. Yeats?

W.B. Yeats 255

Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939

Related quotes

“We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”

Kazuo Ishiguro book Never Let Me Go

Source: Never Let Me Go

“Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.”

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943) British scientist

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

“Baby - thought I'd died and gone to heaven;
Such a night I never had before.
Thought I'd died and gone to heaven,
Cause what I got there ain't no cure for.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Thought I'd Died and Gone to Heaven
Song lyrics, Waking Up the Neighbours (1991)

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Context: The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.