Charlatans Quotes - Page 2

• A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

  Leszek Kolakowski

  Reading, Mind, Philosopher

  "Metaphysical Horror". Book by Leszek Kołakowski, 1988.

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• The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, by worshipping that crucified sophist and living under his laws...they receive these doctrines by tradition, without any definite evidence. So if any charlatan or trickster comes among them, he quickly acquires wealth by imposing upon these simple people.

  Lucian

  Simple, Law, People

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• The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

  Bertrand Russell

  Men, Intellectual, Vices

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Bertrand Russell's Best”, p.62, Routledge

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• Legislators and revolutionaries who promise both equality and liberty are visionaries and charlatans.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Political, Promise, Liberty

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

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• Scientists willing to risk their reputations on higher dimensions soon found themselves ridiculed by the scientific community. Higher-dimensional space became the last refuge for mystics, cranks, and charlatans.

  Michio Kaku

  Space, Community, Risk

  Michio Kaku (1995). “Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension”, p.23, OUP Oxford

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• Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.

  Meir Shalev

  Art, Creativity, Science

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• The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Engineering, Long, People

  "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. November 28, 2000.

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• The soldier's business is to take life. For that he is paid by the State, eulogized by political charlatans and upheld by public hysteria. But woman's function is to give life, yet neither the State nor politicians nor public opinion have ever made the slightest provision in return for the life woman has given.

  Emma Goldman

  Hysteria, Giving, Political

  Emma Goldman (2016). “Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926”, p.102, PM Press

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• The most recent incarnation of [Bob] Dylan has been the traveling journeyman/ charlatan who sings roots music, snarls dark lyrics that make "All Along the Watchtower" sound like a Disney tune, hosts an old-school radio show, and turns up in some unusual places, like ads for Chrysler and Victoria's Secret.

  Jay Michaelson

  School, Dark, Roots

  Source: www.thedailybeast.com

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• The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

  Emma Goldman

  Heart, Space, Soul

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• I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.” Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.

  Chaim Potok

  Views, Stronger, World

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• There's no greater sign of the failure of the American educational system than the extent to which Americans are distracted by the possibility that Earth might end on December 21, 2012. It's a profound absence of awareness of the laws of physics and how nature works. So they're missing some science classes in their training in high school or in college that would empower them to understand and to judge when someone else is basically just full of it. Science is like an inoculation against charlatans who would have you believe whatever it is they tell you.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Educational, Believe, School

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• I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

  Mordecai Richler

  Doctors, Essence, Problem

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.

  Warren Buffett

  Business, Decision, Earning

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• A general must be a charlatan.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Napoleon Bonaparte “Napoleon in his own words from the French of Jules Bertaut”, Рипол Классик

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• My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.

  Stephen Fry

  Firsts, Facts, Kind

  Stephen Fry (2003). “The Liar”, p.35, Soho Press

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• It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees - this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.

  Anton Chekhov

  Time, Artist, Thinking

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• The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Doctors, Dies

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• To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Doors, Political, Television

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• Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Ignorance, Vaccines, Intellectual

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• Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

  Primo Levi

  Ideas, Alchemist, Gold

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• Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

  Noam Chomsky

  Self, Amusing, Conscious

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• And so it must be with the energy you muster for your own work. Get out there and convert the unconverted. Save them all from the charlatans and the nearly-men.

  Chris Murray

  Men, Energy, Muster

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• Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Would Be, Politics, Sincere

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2016). “Selected Writings”, p.198, Simon and Schuster

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• Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

  Orson Welles

  Artist, Way, Very True

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