Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 2: The Charlock’s Shade, Ch. 14: The Charlock’s Shade (p. 116)
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi
The Bonhoeffer Reader https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Bonhoeffer_Reader/CNZgAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA766, p. 766 <br class="br">Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), On Stupidity
“…one enemy can do more hurt, than ten friends can do good.”
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet
Journal to Stella (30 June, 1711)
“No tool is more beneficial than intelligence. No enemy is more harmful than ignorance.”
Al-Shaykh Al-Mufid (948–1022) scholar
http://encarta.msn.com/quote_561557126/Intelligence_No_tool_is_more_beneficial_than.html
The Book of Guidance into the Lives of the Twelve Imams, 1981, "The Life of the Commander of the Faithful" (I. K. A. Howard (tr.)).
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) French philosopher
De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties (1758)
Context: Discipline is, in a manner, nothing else but the art of inspiring the soldiers with greater fear of their officers than of the enemy. This fear has often the effect of courage: but it cannot prevail against the fierce and obstinate valor of people animated by fanaticism, or warm love of their country.
Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)
Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty
Variant translations
It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only second best.
Source: The Art of War, Chapter III · Strategic Attack
“Style… the very hall-mark of great art… there is little use in trying to define style.”
Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human
Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 483
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation
Context: Enemies of truth. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
“An enemy forgiven is more dangerous than a thousand foes.”
Rodolfo Graziani (1882–1955) Italian general
Quoted in "The Suez Canal in World Affairs" - Page 79 - by Hugh Joseph Schonfield - 1952
“Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
As quoted in Bernard Shaw : The Lure of Fantasy (1991) by Michael Holroyd
1940s and later
