Folly Quotes - Page 39

• World unity is the wish of the hopeful, the goal of the idealist and the dream of the romantic. Yet it is folly to the realist and a lie to the innocent.

  Don Williams

  Dream, Lying, Goal

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• Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly

  Jacques Barzun

  Fashion, Eye, Vices

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• To Believe without evidence and demonstration is an act of ignorance and folly

  Socrates

  Believe, Ignorance, Demonstration

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• The sheer folly of trying to defend a nation by destroying all life on the planet must be apparent to anyone capable of rational thought. Nuclear capability must be reduced to zero, globally, permanently. There is no other option.

  Queen Noor of Jordan

  Zero, Trying, Nuclear

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• I love you as one should, to excess. With folly, delight and despair.

  Jeanne Julie Eleonore de Lespinasse

  Love, Despair, Excess

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• You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Women, Answers, Fool

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• It is not enough to prove something, one also has to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learns how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Wisdom, Men, People

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter (1997). “Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality”, p.162, Cambridge University Press

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• SATIRE, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Kindness, Imperfection, Enemy

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.197, 谷月社

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• Life is hollow without health and freedom. To seek one while ignoring the other is folly.

  G. Edward Griffin

  Life Is, Hollow

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• Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the miners’ strike has been a disgrace. The price to be paid for his folly will be immense. He will have destroyed the NUM as an effective fighting force within British trade unionism for the next 20 years. If kamikaze pilots were to form their own union, Arthur would be an ideal choice for leader.

  Jimmy Reid

  Fighting, Years, Choices

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• Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Country, Government, Justice

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• Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Friendship, Pride, Government

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• Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.

  Hinton Rowan Helper

  Ignorance, Parent, Slavery

  Hinton Rowan Helper (1857). “The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet it”, p.406

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• Despair is deadly sin, but worse, it is mortal folly.

  Ellis Peters

  Despair, Sin, Mortals

  Ellis Peters (2016). “Brother Cadfael: The Complete Chronicles”, p.1400, Head of Zeus Ltd

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• Too much trust is folly, in an imperfect world.

  Ellis Peters

  Trust, Imperfect World, Too Much

  Ellis Peters (2016). “Brother Cadfael: The Complete Chronicles”, p.492, Head of Zeus Ltd

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• It is an amiable part of human nature, that we should love our animals; it is even better to love them to the point of folly, than not to love them at all.

  Stevie Smith

  Animal, Human Nature, Should

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• Funeralese has had its ups and downs. The word 'morticians,' first used in Embalmers Monthly for February, 1895, was barred by the Chicago Tribune in 1932, 'not for lack of sympathy with the ambition of undertakers to be well regarded, but because of it. If they haven't the sense to save themselves from their own lexicographers, we shall not be guilty of abetting them in their folly.

  Jessica Mitford

  Ambition, Firsts, Chicago

  JESSICA MITFORD (1963). “THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH”

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• Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Power, Men, Remains

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam”, p.382, Random House

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• One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change it would be dead. ... Each time the new ideas appear they are seen at first as a deadly foe threatening to make religion perish from the earth; but in the end there is a deeper insight and a better life with ancient follies and prejudices gone.

  Edith Hamilton

  Ideas, Giving, Religion

  Edith Hamilton (1993). “The Greek Way”, p.225, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The conservatives have already accepted a large part of the collectivist creed-a creed that has governed policy for so long that many of its institutions have come to be accepted as a matter of course and have become a source of pride to "conservative" parties who created them. Here the believer in freedom cannot but conflict with the conservative and take an essentially radical position, directed against popular prejudices, entrenched positions, and firmly established privileges. Follies and abuses are no better for having long been established principles of folly.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Party, Pride, Long

  "The Constitution of Liberty". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Postscript: Why I Am Not a Conservative, 1960.

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• Hospitality sometimes degenerates into profuseness, and ends in madness and folly.

  Francis Atterbury

  Degenerates, Madness, Hospitality

  Francis Atterbury, Nitish K. Basu (1740). “A History of English Literature: The Norman conquest to the dawn of Renaissance & Geoffrey Chaucer”, p.105

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• Whoever is wise is apt to suspect and be diffident of himself, and upon that account is willing to "hearken unto counsel"; whereas the foolish man, being in proportion to his folly full of himself, and swallowed up in conceit, will seldom take any counsel but his own, and for that very reason, because it is his own.

  John Balguy

  Wise, Wisdom, Men

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• The wisdom of one generation will be folly in the next.

  Joseph Priestley

  Wisdom, Generations, Next

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• Fashion is everywhere and about everything. It is folly, vanity and the fun of it all. It is disguise, innuendo, and cunning. It is mean, gorgeous and ambitious, and definitely the last word for the next few seconds.

  Barbara Kruger

  Fashion, Fun, Mean

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• One's conscience reproaches one much more stingingly for one's follies than one's crimes.

  Geraldine Jewsbury

  Crime, Reproach, Conscience

  Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury (1892). “Selections from the Letters of Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle”

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