Humbug Quotes

• New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Marriage, New Year

  Mark Twain (1979). “Early Tales & Sketches, Vol. 1: 1851-1864”, p.180, Univ of California Press

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• every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

  Charles Dickens

  Heart, Merry Christmas, History

  Charles Dickens (1858). “A Christmas Carol”, p.5

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• Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

  Mark Twain

  Laughter, Blow, Rags

  "The Mysterious Stranger". Book by Mark Twain, 1916.

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• Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

  H. G. Wells

  Fear, Lying, Men

  Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) ch. 23

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• The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself.

  Carl Jung

  Intelligent, Men, Illusion

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1977). “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The development of personality”

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• Let us not foist this humbug on the world.

  Ryan Shawcross

  World

  "International: Are We Ready?". content.time.com. December 09, 1946.

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• Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

  Max Frisch

  Believe, Destiny, Pieces

  Max Frisch (1958). “I'm not Stiller”, Vintage

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• People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.

  Edmond de Goncourt

  Simple, Civilization, Fairy Stories

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• Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.

  Alfred Nobel

  Second Chance, Agriculture, Age

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• We have looked into the future and the future is ours.

  Cesar Chavez

  Cesar Chavez's address to the Commonwealth Club, esl-bits.net. November 9, 1984.

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• There is only one true thing: Instantly paint what you see.

  Edouard Manet

  Paint, True Things

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• The voice of the people is the voice of humbug.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Latin, Voice, People

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• You don't have to call it God or Jesus. That's religious humbug to a lot of people, but you've gotta believe that nature and spiritual things surround us. That is what put us here! I thank the universe for that every day of my life.

  Jack LaLanne

  Thank You, Spiritual, Religious

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• There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

  Edouard Manet

  Paint, Begin Again, Havens

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• Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.

  George Eliot

  Ignorance, May, Pills

  George Eliot (1866). “Felix Holt: The Radical”, p.29

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• Sensitive, humbug. Everybody thinks I'm sensitive. Wait until they hear my new album.

  Carole King

  Thinking, Waiting, Albums

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• An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.

  Alan K. Simpson

  Education, Men, Thinking

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• Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

  Desmond Tutu

  Children, Heart, Wonderful

  Desmond Tutu, John Webster (1982). “Bishop Desmond Tutu, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: a collection of his recent statements in the struggle for justice in South Africa”

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• In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Want, Had Enough, Harmony

  Naomi E. Maurer, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (1998). “The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin”, p.35, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

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• Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things. - Humbug

  Norton Juster

  Trying, Looks, Sides

  Norton Juster (2011). “The Phantom Tollbooth”, p.86, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

  Charles Dickens

  Population, Scrooge, Christmas Carol

  Charles Dickens (1858). “A Christmas Carol”, p.9

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• There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Dream, Reality, History

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• Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

  Oscar Wilde

  Learning, Men, Gentleman

  Oscar Wilde (2016). “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.24, Macmillan

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• The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.

  Albert Camus

  Men, Numbers, Land

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• I had no idea of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom.

  Winston Churchill

  Play, Ideas, Dwelling

  Winston Churchill (2010). “My Early Life: 1874-1904”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

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