
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter I: Balkan Europe; Section 1, “The European War and After” (p. 18)
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Source: BBC Documentary based on Adam Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost'
Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
As quoted in "Is World Peace on the Horizon?", in The Watchtower (15 April 1991)
1960s
Source: Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)
Context: The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.
“Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.”
Sonnet XXX from Fatal Interview (1931)
Context: Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
(zh-TW) 非其鬼而祭之,諂也。見義不為,無勇也。
The Analects, Chapter I, Chapter II
Source: Introduction to 1961 edition of Sceptical Essays (1961)