“I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much.”
Hocus Pocus (1990)
Context: I think William Shakespeare was the wisest human being I ever heard of. To be perfectly frank, though, that's not saying much. We are impossibly conceited animals, and actually dumb as heck. Ask any teacher. You don't even have to ask a teacher. Ask anybody. Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
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Kurt Vonnegut 318
American writer 1922–2007Related quotes

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 43, November 11, 1947.

“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.”
The psychoanalyst "Dr. Krokowski" in Ch. 1
The Magic Mountain (1924)

As quoted in a September 1970 Ray Connolly interview http://www.rayconnolly.co.uk/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=78 for the Evening Standard.

Speech on Religious Intolerance as presented at the Pittsburgh Opera House (14 October 1879).
Context: They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.

Letter to his sister Priscilla (16 February 1846), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 147.
1840s