“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 Vonnegut318
American writer 1922–2007Related quotes
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
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.”
Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain
The psychoanalyst "Dr. Krokowski" in Ch. 1
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Dusty Springfield (1939–1999) English singer and record producer
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.
Julian Assange book When Google Met Wikileaks
Source: Julian Assange, "When Google Met Wikileaks" (ORbooks, New York, 2014), p. 118
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
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.
John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman
Letter to his sister Priscilla (16 February 1846), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 147.
1840s