Quotes about fool
page 7

“The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.
Any fool can do it;
There ain't nothing to it.
Nobody knows how we got to
The top of the hill.
But since we're on our way down,
We might as well enjoy the ride.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Secret O' Life"
Song lyrics, JT (1977)

Life, Secret, Fools, Way

“"I know you," he said. "I know your scent. Long ago, yes, but I never forget. I know your name."
"A friend of a friend, perhaps?" I eyed his spear-tip nervously. Unlike Eagle-beak, he didn't wave it about at all.
"No… an enemy…"
"Terrible when you can't remember something that's right on the tip of your tongue," I observed. "Isn't it, though? And you try so hard to recall it, but often as not you can't because some fool's interrupting you, prattling away so you can't concentrate, and-"
Bull-head gave a bellow of rage. "Shut up! I almost had it then!"”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

The Amulet of Samarkand (2003)

Fools, Rage, Forgetting

“Truscott: I'm no fool.
Fay: Your secret is safe with me.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act II

Secret, Fools

“We have all experienced the moments that William James calls melting moods, when it suddenly becomes perfectly obvious that life is infinitely fascinating. And the insight seems to apply retrospectively. Periods of my life that seemed confusing and dull at the time now seem complex and rather charming. It is almost as if some other person a more powerful and mature individual has taken over my brain. This higher self views my problems and anxieties with kindly detachment, but entirely without pity. Looking at problems through his eyes, I can see I was a fool to worry about them.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 2-3

Life, Fools, Mood, Problem

“I am but a draper in a room of wool, looking at the patterns, feeling like a fool. I'm going to take my fabric, stretch it to the seams, I want to find what's woven underneath these tailored dreams”

Ralston Bowles (1952) American musician

From the song "Draper" on the album Carwreck Conversations (2004)

Dreams, Fools, Feeling

“We simply must speak to each other honestly about all these hard truths. In the words of Dr. King, 'We must learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Truth, Fools, Learning

“I thought today's women were independent and had a lot of sexual freedom. … Well, I guess they fooled me.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

In April 2006, about women's disaproval of one-night stands. As quoted in Trump on Clinton in 2008: ‘She'd make a good president' https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-on-clinton-in-2008-shed-make-a-good-president-2016-07-11 (July 11, 2016) by Michael Rothfield and Mark Maremont, MarketWatch. 2000s

Women, Fools, Freedom

“I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. 'Who are you?' asks the knight. 'I am Death.' Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.
Images : My Life in Films (1990)

Death, Fools, Feeling, Appearance

“The parasite has somehow evolved to turn off the host's defenses, presumably by disarming the crab's immune response with some chemical trickery that fools the host into accepting the parasite as part of itself. …The adult parasite castrates the host, not by directly eating the gonadal tissue, but by some unknown mechanism probably involving penetration of the interna's roots around and into the crab's nervous system.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 367
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Fools, Parting

“Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2, p. 78.
Forty Years On (1972)

God, Fools

“The U. S. Army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at. It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools, and bullies. The few good sergeants are getting out as soon as they can, and they are telling us privates to do the same.”

Bowe Bergdahl (1986) American soldier captured by the Taliban in 2009 and released in 2014 as part of a prisoner swap

Last e-mail to parents (2009)

World, Fools

“Pages full of idle words
Penned with hot and bitter tears:
All men call the author fool;
None his secret message hears.”

Cao Xueqin book Dream of the Red Chamber

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 1

Men, Secret, Fools, Tear

“Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.”

Doron Zeilberger (1950) Israeli mathematician

"Real" Analysis is a Degenerate Case of Discrete Analysis. Appeared in the book "New Progress in Difference Equations"(Proc. ICDEA 2001), edited by Bernd Aulbach, Saber Elaydi, and Gerry Ladas, and publisher by Taylor & Francis, London, 2004.

Wisdom, World, Fools, Evil

“We are all fools when one wise man appears.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Call Of Earth (1992)

Fools, Appearance

“I would make a fool of myself…They are so much better than I was.”

Nigel Lythgoe (1949) Executive producer and television director

On why he never dances on So You Think You Can Dance
Looseleaf, Victoria (August 2007), "A MAN, A PLAN, A WILDLY SUCCESSFUL TV SHOW". Dance Magazine. 81 (8):46

Fools

““Sometimes, Skorous,” Draco said, “you are a fool.”
“Sometimes I am not alone in that.””

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) British writer

Short fiction, Into Gold (1986)

Fools

“If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

T. B. Saunders, trans., § 38
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

People, Fools, Feeling, Imagination

“The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!”

Rudyard Kipling book Plain Tales from the Hills

Three and—an Extra.
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)

Fools

“I know that there are a lot of areas inside me which I need to analyse. But I need time. I can't be rushed into it. Even if it keeps lingering in the back of my mind always. I keep joking, fooling around on the sets, trying to push everything away for a later day scrutiny. I don't even want to acknowledge those dark corners of my insides as yet. And if at all I do it, I'll do it for no one else but myself. Not my wife, not my parents. Maybe my children - maybe just my son. Nobody else. Of course, there is also another way of looking at things. Supposing I did not have this pressure of talking to the media, maybe people like you and others would have always thought of me as somebody else. I don't know what opinion of me you have now. I don't know what you felt before you met me, how you felt while you were interviewing me and how you feel today and how you'll feel tomorrow. But I'm sure there will be a difference. Because forming an opinion without meeting a person and judging your instincts and impressions after meeting him are two different things. Most people I've met of late have gone back thinking exactly the contrary of what they thought earlier. I've tried to be as honest as I can with you. I can tell you that I've never spoken like this to anyone before. I wonder if you're convinced. You don't look it. Maybe I will convince you someday.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Children, People, Fools, Way

“There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Boldness
Essays (1625)

Fools, Nature

“I have a fear of heights, so falling off something very tall. But I've conquered a good amount of my fears. I guess most people would have the fear of getting up in front of a large audience of people and making a fool of themselves. I've gotten over that.”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

'Beck - On the Couch', NME

People, Fear, Fools

“You can play the game and you can act out the part.
Though you know it wasn't written for you.
But tell me, how can you stand there with your broken heart,
Ashamed of playing the fool?
One thing can lead to another; it doesn't take any sacrifice.
Oh, father and mother, and sister and brother,
If it feels nice, don't think twice.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

Shower the People"
Song lyrics, In the Pocket (1976)

Fools, Feeling, Game, Thinking

“Bless your soul, you've got you're head in the clouds,
You made a fool out of you,
And, boy, she's bringing you down,
She made your heart melt,
But you're cold to the core,
Now rumour has it she ain't got your love anymore.”

Adele (singer) (1988) British singer-songwriter

Rumour Has It, written by Adele and Ryan Tedder
Song lyrics, 21 (2011)

Love, Fools, Soul, Boy

“A knave, when tried on honesty's plain rule,
And, when by that of reason, a mere fool”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Hope

Fools

“Desperate people will do what they must to survive. Only a fool would expect the results to be pretty.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 6 (p. 31)

People, Fools

“The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Pirates of Florida and Other Impossibilities", speech at the Conference on the Fantastic (1991), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

Fools, Adulthood

“There is a certain category of fool—the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic "scientist", the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call "epistemic arrogance", this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 106

Fools

“You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business.”

William Henry Maule (1788–1858) British politician

Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 86. The quotation has been attributed to many others, such as Lord Chief Justice Campbell, Lord Chesterfield, Sir William Harcourt, Lord Pembroke, Lord Westbury, and to an anonymous judge, and said to have been spoken in court to Garter King at Arms, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, or some other high-ranking herald, who had confused a "bend" with a "bar" or had demanded fees to which he was not entitled. George Bernard Shaw quotes it in Pygmalion (1912) in the form, "The silly people dont [sic] know their own silly business."

Maule cannot be the original source of the quotation, as it is quoted nearly twenty years before his birth in Charles Jenner's The Placid Man: Or, The Memoirs of Sir Charles Beville (1770): "Sir Harry Clayton ... was perhaps far better qualified to have written a Peerage of England than Garter King at Arms, or Rouge Dragon, or any of those parti-coloured officers of the court of honor, who, as a great man complained on a late solemnity, are but too often so silly as not to know their own silly business." "Old Lord Pembroke" (Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke) is said by Horace Walpole (in a letter of May 28, 1774 to the Rev. William Cole) to have directed the quip, "Thou silly fellow! Thou dost not know thy own silly business," at John Anstis, Garter King at Arms (though in his 1833 edition of Walpole's letters to Sir Horace Mann, George Agar-Ellis, 1st Baron Dover, attributes the saying to Lord Chesterfield in a footnote, in the form "You foolish man, you do not understand your own foolish business"). Edmund Burke also quotes it ("'Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!' was once well said: but the trade here is not silly.") in a "Speech in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Esq." on May 7, 1789 (when Maule was just over a year old). Chesterfield or Pembroke fit best in point of time.
Attributed

Fools, Business

“Mockery; the righteousness of fools everywhere.”

Peter F. Hamilton Commonwealth Saga

The Agent
Commonwealth Saga, Judas Unchained (2005)

Fools

“Eventually there was a split between my parents about me. My mother obviously knew what was going on with me and the girls my friends lined up. She never came out and said anything directly, but she let me know she was concerned. Things were different between me and my father. He assumed that when I was eighteen, I would just go into the Army and they would straighten me out. He accepted some of the things my mother condemned. He felt it was perfectly all right to make out with all the girls I could. In fact, he was proud I was dating the fast girls. He bragged about them to his friends. 'Jesus Christ, you should see some of the women my son's coming up with'. He was showing off, of course. But still, our whole relationship had changed because I'd established myself by winning a few trophies and now had some girls. He was particularly excited about the girls. And he liked the idea that I didn't get involved. 'That's right, Arnold', he'd say, as though he'd had endless experience, 'never be fooled by them'. That continued to be an avenue of communication between us for a couple of years. In fact, the few nights I took girls home when I was on leave from the Army, my father was always very pleasant and would bring out a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/067122879X (1977), New York: Simon & Schuster. 1970s, Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder (1977)

Women, Fools, Home, Girl

“I know the dark delight of being strange,
The penalty of difference in the crowd,
The loneliness of wisdom among fools”

Claude McKay (1889–1948) Jamaican American writer, poet

Complete Poems, University of Illinois Press, 2004, p. 348

Wisdom, Penalty, Fools, Loneliness

“It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "… In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

Fools, Thinking, Learning

“Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IV, Line 843.

Men, Fools

“.. and the first thing for he artists [of Die Brücke ] was free drawing from the free human figure in the freedom of nature... We drew and we painted. Hundreds of paintings a day, with talk and fooling in between, the artists joining the models before the easel and vice versa. All the encounters of everyday life were incorporated in our memories in this way. The studio became the home of the people who were being drawn; they learned from the artists and the painters from them. The picture [ made] took on immediate and abundant life.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote from Kirchner's Diary, 1923; as cited in Expressionism, de:Wolf-Dieter Dube; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 28-29
1920's

Life, People, Fools, Way

“What has gone wrong with
the men who are ruling
I'd like to know who
they think they are fooling
They told us that torture
was over and gone
but everyone knows
the same torture goes on”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

Singers, act 1, scene 24 (p. 58)
Marat/Sade (1963)

Men, Fools, Thinking

“Deacon Uriel Gadd was a man of integrity, granite-rough and lichen-coated. The punishment in his rheumatism, clearly sent of God, and the defection of his son Elijah, had weakened him only in making him somewhat less contemptuous of his sentimental son Aaron. All other persons he divided into fools, scoundrels and the blessedly elect, with only himself indisputably in the last class.”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 6

God, Fools, Personality

“I am very sorry these Moros are such fools—but this Dajo will not mean the slaugter of women and children, nor hasty assaults against strong entrenchments. I shall lose as few men and kill as few Moros as possible.”

John J. Pershing (1860–1948) United States Army general in World War I

My Life Before the World War, 1860--1917: A Memoir, p. 293 https://books.google.com/books?id=a74_JIbehzsC&pg=PA293

Women, Men, Children, Fools

“Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.”

Stanisław Lem book Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth (1987), tr. Elinor Ford (1994) from Pokój na Ziemi, Ch. 1

War, Fools

“Take to the highway, won't you lend me your name?
Your way and my way seem to be one and the same, child.
Mamma don't understand it.
She wants to know where I've been.
I'd have to be some kind of natural born fool
To want to pass that way again.
But I could feel it
On a country road.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Country Road"
Song lyrics, Sweet Baby James (1970)

Fools, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“You damned fools. You can either vote for me for mayor or you can go to hell.”

John Wentworth (1815–1888) American newspaper editor and politician

Quoted in Chicago Magazine, June 2006 http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2006/The-Perfect-Mayor/

Fools, Hell

“We have a saying, we travelers: ‘For a man’s business, go to your troupe leader; for a woman’s business, go to Women’s Country. For a fool’s business, go to the warriors.”

Sheri S. Tepper book The Gate to Women's Country

Source: The Gate to Women's Country (1988), Chapter 16 (p. 173)

Women, Fools, Travel, Business

“They call me deranged. The hope is that they are right! It is of no greater or lesser import for yet another fool to wander this Earth. But if I am right and science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind!”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Olof Alexandersson: Living Water
Living Water

God, Hope, Fools, Science

“Revenge is good. I think revenge is healthy too, and if you can use music in that way, a sort of therapeutic way for yourself, it can't do any harm. So if King (For A Day…Fool For A Lifetime) is angry in any way, it's angry in a random, chaotic, healthy way. Like the guy who goes into a building, shoots a bunch of holes in the wall and then leaves. He didn't kill anybody.”

Mike Patton (1968) American singer

"Faith No More" - (CMJ New Music Monthly, April 1995)

Fools, Music, Way, Guy

“The friendship of one wise man is better than the friendship of a host of fools.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

Friendship, Fools

“Jean Jacques Rousseau," he answered, "is nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey…. For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

J.-J. Rousseau, répondit-il, n'est à mes yeux qu'un sot, lorsqu'il s'avise de juger le grand monde; il ne le comprenait pas, et y portait le cœur d'un laquais parvenu... Tout en prêchant la république et le renversement des dignités monarchiques, ce parvenu est ivre de bonheur, si un duc change la direction de sa promenade après dîner, pour accompagner un de ses amis.
Vol. II, ch. VIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Fools, Understanding, Heart, Joy

“Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

" The Cow in Apple-Time http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cow-in-apple-time-the/" 1910s

Fools, Thinking

“I belong to the generation of 1968, which, throughout the world, hoped to recast society on the model of the imagination. I have tried to learn from disappointment and defeat, but I have not despaired. "If the fool would persist in his folly," wrote William Blake, "he would become wise."”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 188

World, Hope, Fools, Disappointment

“The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Austin O'Malley, in Keystones of Thought (1914), p. 27
Attributed

Fools, Time

“There is no description of a fool, he said, that you fail to satisfy.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Fools

“Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

quoted by Gary Wolf in "The Curse of Xanadu" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html in Wired (6/1995)

God, People, Fools

“Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

#39
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Fools, Confidence, Teachers, Science

“We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.”

T. H. White book The Book of Merlyn

The Book of Merlyn (1977)

Death, Fools, Democracy, Communication

“Only a fool loves war. Or a man who has never seen it. The trouble is that the survivors forget about the horrors and remember only the battle lust. They pass on that memory, and other men hunger for it.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 24

Love, Men, Hunger, War

“Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There."”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Fools

“Fools pretend to foretell what will be the issue of things, and are laughed at for their awkward conjectures. Wise men being aware of the uncertainty of human aflairs, and having observed how small a matter often produces a great change, are modest in their conjectures.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Men, Fools, Change

“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, God, Children, World

“He was a fool,” said Willow calmly to Klein. “There are many who refuse their responsibilities. Fooling themselves they search for a ‘higher ideal’. He was a fool.”
“What are responsibilities?” said Klein laconically. “He knows. Responsibility, my dear, is another word for self-interest. For survival.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

She looked at Klein uncomprehendingly.
Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 206)

Fools, Search

“I would die happy if I knew that on my tombstone could be written these words, "This man was an absolute fool. None of the disastrous things that he reluctantly predicted ever came to pass!"”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Address to the National Book Awards Committee, published in My Works and Days (1979)

Happiness, Fools

“That man is a fool,” Lady Marta said, her dark eyes staring at Baron Hepplethong’s retreating back. “Most men are fools, but he carries it to unnatural extremes. I have the misfortune to be distantly related to him. He believes in the natural superiority of the white race, the noble class, and the male sex. He also feels that people who wear green are morally superior to those who wear red or brown. I do not jest.”

Michael Kurland book Ten Little Wizards

Source: Ten Little Wizards (1988), Chapter 14 (p. 141)

Men, People, Fools, Sex

“Hey, that last skit was written for a reason. If any of your buddies had fooled around with a sixty year old man, don't throw them out of your car, or you will die. Now, enjoy the rest of the album!”

Adam Sandler (1966) American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer

What The Hell Happened To Me!? (1996)

Fools, Cars

“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

"Love and Marriage"
To My Daughters, With Love (1967)

Fools

“True. True talk,” said Kim solemnly. “Fools speak of a cat when a woman is brought to bed, for instance. I have heard them.”

Rudyard Kipling Kim

Kim, Chapter 8 (1901).
Other works

Fools, Cats

“A fooles bolt is soone shot.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part II, chapter 3.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Fools

“He wanted to tell me that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. Christ had said it, Seymour thought I'd want to know, because there are no fools. Dopes, yes — fools, no.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Fools, Christ

“No man is esteemed for gay garments but by fools and women.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: Instructions to his Son and to Posterity (published 1632), Chapter VII

Women, Fools

“Those dreams that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shapes our minds delude
… are mere productions of the brain.
And fools consult interpreters in vain.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On Dreams (1727)

Dreams, Fools, Falseness, Night

“True wisdom knows
it must comprise
some nonsense
as a compromise,
lest fools should fail
to find it wise.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

Lest Fools Should Fail
Grooks

Wisdom, Fools

“I suffer fools gladly because I am one of them.”

Harry Secombe (1921–2001) British entertainer

Fools, Suffering

“The idol, Jwalamukhi, much worshipped by the infidels, was situated on the road to Nagarkot Some of the infidels have reported that Sultan Firoz went specially to see this idol and held a golden umbrella over it. But the author was informed by his respected father, who was in the Sultans retinue, that the infidels slandered the Sultan, who was a religious, God-fearing man, who, during the whole forty years of his reign, paid strict obedience to the law, and that such an action was impossible. The fact is, that when he went to see the idol, all the rais, ranas and zamindars who accompanied him were summoned into his presence, when he addressed them, saying, O fools and weak-minded, how can ye pray to and worship this stone, for our holy law tells us that those who oppose the decrees of our religion, will go to hell? The Sultan held the idol in the deepest detestation, but the infidels, in the blindness of their delusion, have made this false statement against him. Other infidels have said that Sultan Muhammad Shah bin Tughlik Shah held an umbrella over the same idol, but this is also a lie; and good Muhammadans should pay no heed to such statements. These two Sultans were sovereigns especially chosen by the Almighty from among the faithful, and in the whole course of their reigns, wherever they took an idol temple they broke and destroyed it; how, then, can such assertions be true? The infidels must certainly have lied!”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Nagarkot Kangra (Himachal Pradesh) . Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. Elliot and Dowson. Vol. III, p. 318 ff

God, Lie, Fear, Faith

“Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.”

John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

Pleasure, Fools, Feeling, Intelligence

“It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

J 157
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

Children, Truth, Fools, Feeling

“I want to give [my records] all away before some fool plays disco at my funeral, and then the record gets stuck, and nobody can tell, and the service goes on forever!”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

"Pouf Positive"
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

Fools

“O wise among all Angels ordinate,
God foiled of glory, god betrayed by fate,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
O Prince of Exile doomed to heinous wrong,
Who, vanquished, riseth ever stark and strong,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thou knowest all, proud king of occult things,
Familiar healer of man's sufferings,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!
Thy love wakes thirst for Heaven in one and all:
Leper, pimp, outcast, fool and criminal,
Satan, O pity my long wretchedness!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges, Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!Ô Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!Toi qui sais tout, grand roi des choses souterraines, Guérisseur familier des angoisses humaines,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits, Enseignes par l'amour le goût du Paradis,Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! "Les Litanies de Satan" [Litanies of Satan] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Litanies_de_Satan Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Love, God, Fate, Fools

“[Chapman] is a strong candidate for being the fool’s gold of the current free-agent market.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

On $30 million Cuban pitcher Aroldis Chapman's readiness for Major League Baseball, from the New York Times article "Risks Seen in Signing Cuban Defector" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/sports/baseball/04chapman.html by Jack Curry (3 December 2009)

Fools, Strong

“You would probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about when he climbed into bed of a night and turned off the light.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 3

Fools, Sleep, Light, Night

“Quit yo Jibber-jabber! You ain't hurt, yo pathetic!, Argh! If I ever catch you acting like a crazy fool again, you're gonna meet my friend pain! Snickers, get some nuts!”

Mr. T (1952) American actor and retired professional wrestler

Snickers Advert (2007)

Pain, Fools, Hurt

“When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 346
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

People, Fools, Intelligence, Understanding

“Like a fool I went and stayed too long,
Now I'm wondering if your love's still strong,
Ooh, baby, here I am,
Signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours!”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)
Song lyrics

Love, Fools, Strong, Baby

“Keep a watch out, fools! There are things out there and you know what happens when things arrive!”

Steven Erikson book The Bonehunters

The Bonehunters (2006)

Fools

“A man who says he feels no fear is either a fool or a liar.”

Fred Dibnah (1938–2004) English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering

Unsourced

Fear, Fools, Feeling

“That accounts for a truly crazy cycle in which students repeat the worst stylistic excesses the journals contain, learn that those very excesses are what makes their work different from what every damn fool knows and says, write more articles like those they learned from, submit them to journals whose editors publish them because nothing better is available (and because academic journals cannot afford expensive copy editing) and thus provide the raw material for another generation to learn bad habits from.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 41.

Fools, Learning

“Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is “wishful thinking.” You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

"Bulverism" (1941)

Fools, Error, Thinking, Chance

“To let a fool kiss you is stupid,
To let a kiss fool you is worse.”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

"Inscription On A Lipstick" in The Garment Worker Vol. 41 (1941), p. 10.

Stupidity, Fools, Kiss

“She was getting pally with a scally in the alley
Giving head for gear
She called a spade a spade
Got slit from ear to ear
I showed no decorum
Spilled my heart out on the forum
Like a snapshot of the most tragic day
Carl is kept sedated, for the frontman elevated
While McGee does all he can to ruin my band and keep me out the way
In this industry of fools, musclemen and ghouls
If you're not a puppet or a muppet then you might as well call it a day
The truth gets so distorted
The wall scrapings get snorted
I'm welcome back if I give up crack
But you gave me my first pipe anyway”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"Gang of Gin" (never released owing to threats of legal action by pop mogul Alan McGee)
Lyrics and poetry

Truth, Fools, Way, Heart

“Having given her the formula of invocation only once, she hath, O king, managed to obtain two sons. Have I not been thus deceived by her, I fear, O king, that she will soon surpass me in the number of her children. This, indeed, is the way of all wicked women. Fool that I was, I did not know that by invoking the twin gods I could obtain at one birth twin children. I beseech thee, O king, do not command me any further. Let this be the boon granted (by thee) to me.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Kunti reply to Pandu who requested her on behalf of Madri for more children.
The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIV

Women, God, Children, Fear

“You are a fool in three letters, my son.”

Molière book Tartuffe

Vous êtes un sot en trois lettres, mon fils.
Act I, sc. i
Tartuffe (1664)

Fools

“Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1009

Fools, Sense, Time

“A fool and his money is one big party.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money, Fools

“Most people think themselves kind enough, but rather like a magician thinking he is fooling an audience who can see through his trick, we are the worst judges of the effect we have on others. True, we can mentally point out various kindnesses we have committed and those pleasant aspects of ourselves. Yet by doing so, we ignore the real test cases: how we behave under pressure, how nice we are to people we don’t like, how we deal with other people who seem determined to not live up to our unrealistic expectations.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

People, Fools, Thinking

“I should want to go home, like Fenella. I should be so tired of the shambles here, the obscurantism, the colour-prejudice, the laziness and ignorance, as to desire nothing better than a headship in a cold stone country school in England. But I love this country. I feel protective towards it. Sometimes just before dawn breaks, I feel that somehow I enclose it, contain it. I feel that it needs me. This is absurd, because snakes and scorpions are ready to bite me, a drunken Tamil is prepared to knife me, the Chinese in the town would like to spit at me, some day a Malay boy will run amok and try to tear me apart. But it doesn’t matter. I want to live here; I want to be wanted. Despite the sweat, despite the fever, the prickly heat, the mosquitoes, the terrorists, the fools at the bar of the club, despite Fenella.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Love, School, Fools, Feeling

“Don't be fooled into turning to Communism looking for food. ]]”

Jomo Kenyatta (1893–1978) First prime minister and first president of Kenya

Reported in Lamb, David. The Africans. Page 61.

Food, Fools, Communication

“Back! back! Away from me, or you must go with me — whither you know not — into the Land of Three Dimensions!""Fool! Madman! Irregular!" I exclaimed; "never will I release thee; thou shalt pay the penalty of thine impostures.""Ha! Is it come to this?" thundered the Stranger: "then meet your fate: out of your Plane you go. Once, twice, thrice! 'Tis done!"”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 17. How the Sphere, Having in Vain Tried Words, Resorted to Deeds

Fate, Penalty, Fools

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

Solomon (-990–-931 BC) king of Israel and the son of David

[Proverbs, 1:7, KJV] (KJV)

Wisdom, Fear, Fools, Knowledge

“Much of what you see in the Catholic Church today doesn't come from God's Word, it comes from that cult-like, pagan religion. Now you say, "Pastor, how can you say such a thing? That is such an indictment of the Catholic Church. After all the Catholic Church talks about God and the Bible and Jesus and the Blood of Christ and Salvation."Isn't that the genius of Satan? If you want to counterfeit a dollar bill, you don't do it with purple paper and red ink, you're not going to fool anybody with that. But if you want to counterfeit money, what you do is make it look closely related to the real thing as possible.And that's what Satan does with counterfeit religion. He uses, he steals, he appropriates all of the symbols of true biblical Christianity, and he changes it just enough in order to cause people to miss eternal life.”

Robert Jeffress (1955) Pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas

The Response, American Family Association prayer rally, Reliant Stadium, Houston, , quoted in * 2011-10-08
Jeffress Says Satan Is Behind Roman Catholicism
Brian
Tashman
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/jeffress-says-satan-behind-roman-catholicism

Life, Money, God, People

“Everyone said he was a fool.
Everyone said she was a clever woman.
They used the word ensnare.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman

Fools

“…both company managements and stockholders might well consider a lesson King Lear learned -that when the role of dissenter is left to the Fool, there may be trouble ahead for everybody.”

John Brooks (writer) (1920–1993) American writer

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

Fools, Learning

“Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Book III, Ch. 8
This quote is a paraphrase of a lengthier statement, as follows: We ordinarily see, in the actions of the world, that Fortune, to shew us her power in all things, and who takes a pride in abating our presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them fortunate in emulation of virtue; and most favours those operations the web of which is most purely her own; whence it is that the simplest amongst us bring to pass great business, both public and private; and, as Seiramnes, the Persian, answered those who wondered that his affairs succeeded so ill, considering that his deliberations were so wise, ‘that he was sole master of his designs, but success was wholly in the power of fortune’; these may answer the same, but with a contrary turn.
From Essays of Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton (1877), Book the Third, Chapter VIII — Of The Art Of Conference. Note : this is the version found at Project Gutenberg.
Attributed

Fools