οἱ πλειστoι κακoί.
Most people are evil.
Βίας ὁ Πριηνεύς (Bias of Priene, 6th century BC)
[He is one of the Seven Sages and is renowned for his probity.]
The important thing is that death finds us alive.
Marcello Marchesi
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
Oscar Wilde
There is nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.
Sophocles
To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.
Harry G. Frankfurt
Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.
Harry G. Frankfurt
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Harry G. Frankfurt
The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.
Harry G. Frankfurt
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.
Harry G. Frankfurt
The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Harry G. Frankfurt
We cannot think of ourselves as creatures whose rationality endows us with an especially significant advantage over others—indeed, we cannot think of ourselves as rational creatures at all—unless we think of ourselves as creatures who recognize that facts, and true statements about the facts, are indispensable in providing us with reasons for believing (or for not believing) various things and for taking (or for not taking) various actions. If we have no respect for the distinction between true and false, we may as well kiss our much-vaunted “rationality” good-bye.
Harry G. Frankfurt
What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
Harry G. Frankfurt
There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.
Harry G. Frankfurt
Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid.
Kin Hubbard
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Mark Twain
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
When you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing.
Ambrose Bierce
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Karl Kraus
I cannot abide stupidity, in myself or in others.
Ginger Rogers
Earnestness is stupidity sent to college.
Patrick Jake O'Rourke
In its worse forms, conservatism is a matter of 'I hate strangers and anything that's different.'
Patrick Jake O'Rourke
We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.
George Robert Gissing
I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females, it doesn't change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist.
Marjane Satrapi
No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Man has made use of his intelligence, he invented stupidity.
Remy de Gourmont
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.
Harvey Milk
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.
Confucius
A man is sometimes more generous when he has no money than when he has a lot.
Sigmund Freud
The love of money grows as money grows.
Decimus Junius Juvenal
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
Frank Zappa
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Albert Camus
Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Louise Bogan
Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.
Scott Adams
Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.
Jean Rostand
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith
This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.
David Hume
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
Nelson Mandela
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Nelson Mandela
Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.
Ruth Benedict
I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.
Malcolm X
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our true nationality is mankind.
Herbert George Wells
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
Victor Hugo
We, as human beings, have a responsibility to one another and that it's important that we empathize with others, that we organize society so that we all become happier and we all get the life we really want.
Roger Waters
The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.
Emma Goldman
To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
Baruch Spinoza
I have a wish for world peace and the truth. I would like to see a society that will bring happiness to all life forms. Of course, to the Nazis, I appear a rebel, but to the rebels, I appear like a normal person from Venus.
Nina Hagen
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty.
Plato
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
Plato
I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
Plato
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
Plato
Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.
Plato
There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.
Plato
In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.
Plato
You should not honor men more than truth.
Plato
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.
Plato
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
Plato
Love is the pursuit of the whole.
Plato
Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
Plato
by Raffaello Sanzio
