Imbecility Quotes - Page 2

• He [John Hampden] knew that the essence of war is violence, and that moderation in war is imbecility.

  Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild

  War, Essence, Violence

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• Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Lying, Devil, Body

  Thomas Carlyle (1872). “The French Revolution: a History”, p.48

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• Even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights: the right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities, provided only that he does not try to inflict them upon others by force; he has the right to argue for them as eloquently as he can. But he has no right to be protected from the criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Rights, Challenges

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• Rage is mental imbecility.

  Hosea Ballou

  Rage

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• Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.

  Augustus William Hare

  Art, Inspiration, Men

  Julius Charles HARE (Archdeacon of Lewes. and HARE (Augustus William)), Augustus William HARE (1847). “Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers. Third edition. First Series”, p.280

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• While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.

  Harriet Martineau

  Strong, Years, Feelings

  Harriet Martineau (2015). “Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (Vol. I: Abridged, Annotated)”, p.118, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it. It is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are country neighborhoods in which it rages like a pest. Churches are split in pieces by it. Neighbors are made enemies by it for life. In many persons it degenerates into a chronic disease, which is practically incurable. Let the young cure it while they may.

  J. G. Holland

  Country, Dirty, Indulge In

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• You must elect your work; you shall take what your brains can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. It is a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Taken, Men, Circles

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.339

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• Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religions hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper and deeper.

  Samuel Johnson

  Pain, Fall, Men

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy, Francis Pearson Walesby (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D..: The Rambler”, p.330

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• Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility.

  J. G. Holland

  Gossip, Confession, Malice

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• To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes.

  Elizabeth Gould Davis

  Dream, Sex, Integrity

  "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 22: "Woman in the Aquarian Age", 1971.

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• A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements.

  I. F. Stone

  Movement, Moral, Mark

  I. F. Stone (2009). “The Best of I.F. Stone”, p.235, PublicAffairs

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• The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine - but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Catholic, Church, Divinity

  "The Life of Hilaire Belloc". Book by Robert Speaight, 1957.

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• Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Running, Clouds, Air

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph H. Orth, Glen M. Johnson (1994). “The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.76, University of Missouri Press

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• The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is - Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Hero, Men, Keys

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.344

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• Religion is "so absurd that it comes close to imbecility."

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

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• Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Canvas, Blank, Staring

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• It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

  H. L. Mencken

  Book, Race, Years

  H. L. Mencken (2003). “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.57, See Sharp Press

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• Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

  William Godwin

  Thinking, Government, Assuming

  William Godwin (1793). “An enquiry concerning political justice, and its influence on general virtue and happiness”, p.143

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• What we want is not mainly to colonize Nebraska with free men, but to colonize Massachusetts with free men-to be free ourselves. As the enterprise of a few individuals, that is brave and practical; but as the enterprise of the State, it is cowardice and imbecility. What odds where we squat, or bow much ground we cover? It is not the soil that we would make free, but men.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Freedom, Men, Odds

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.135, David M Gross

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• No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife. Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment a man considers himself, even in petto, he tries to gild and fresco himself. Thus a man's wife, however realistic her view of him, always flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there.

  H. L. Mencken

  Christian, Character, Men

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.325, Vintage

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• Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Money, Heart, Greed

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• Just dash something down if you see a blank canvas staring at you with a certain imbecility. You do not know how paralyzing it is, that staring of a blank canvas which says to the painter: you don't know anything.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Insecurity, Canvas, Blank

  Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Willem Gogh (1927). “The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh to His Brother, 1872-1886: With a Memoir by His Sister-in-law, J. Van Gogh-Bonger ...”

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• If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.

  Denis Diderot

  Character, Criticism, Vices

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• It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

  H. L. Mencken

  Children, Men, Political

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.371, Knopf

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