Humbug Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

  H. G. Wells

  Honesty, Lying, Civilization

  "Love and Mr Lewisham". Book by H. G. Wells, Chapter 23, 1899.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• [You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.

  George Orwell

  Strong, Clever, Writing

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• We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

  Hermann Hesse

  Home, Dirt, Guides

  Hermann Hesse (1963). “Steppenwolf: novel”, Harcourt School

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• As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Rights, Political, Liberty

  Ludwig Von Mises (1990). “Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays”

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• A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it.

  P. D. James

  Believe, Politician

  P. D. James (2010). “A Taste for Death”, p.42, Vintage

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• From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Self, Mazes, Torches

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• I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I've done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don't like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven't a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Mean, People, Wicked

  "A Long Fatal Love Chase". Book by Louisa May Alcott, 1995.

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• If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Lying, Writing, Whole

  Henrik Ibsen (1905). “Letters of Henrik Ibsen”

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• Witchcraft is one of the most baseless, absurd, disgusting and silly of all the humbugs.

  P. T. Barnum

  Silly, Absurd, Witchcraft

  P.T. BARNUM (1866). “THE HUMBUGS OF THE WORLD”, p.307

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• Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretence and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer.

  Walter Guido Vincenti

  Art, Mean, Engineering

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• I am not anti-English, I am not anti-British, I am not anti-any Government, but I am anti-untruth, anti-humbug and anti-injustice.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Government, Injustice, Language

  Mahatma Gandhi, Dennis Dalton (1996). “Gandhi: Selected Political Writings”, p.66, Hackett Publishing

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• As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Men, People, Saint

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• The League of Nations is the greatest humbug in history. They cannot even protect a little nation like Armenia. They do nothing but pass useless resolutions.

  David Lloyd George

  League, Armenia, Useless

  "The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923". Book by George Allardice Riddell, 1986.

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• I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes - and that's because I am passionate about the truth... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans.

  Richard Dawkins

  Knowing, Mind, Atheism

  "Belief" Interview, www.bbc.co.uk. October 22, 2009.

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• The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Humor, Eye, Doe

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

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• Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery.

  Mark Twain

  Talking, Patriotism, Robbery

  Notebook, 26 May 1896

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• The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Kings, Fancy, Politician

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion”, p.282, e-artnow

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• The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Angel, Men

  Diary entry regarding Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, in July 1924. "Letters of C. S. Lewis". Book edited by W. H. Lewis, p. 97, 1966.

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• Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Vanity, Wicked, Foolish

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2016). “Vanity Fair (Diversion Classics)”, p.103, Diversion Books

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• Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him.

  Norton Juster

  Eight, Two, Feet

  Norton Juster (2011). “The Phantom Tollbooth 50th Anniversary Edition”, p.175, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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