Plausible Quotes

• There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.

  H. L. Mencken

  Business, Simple Solutions, Neat And Tidy

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.443, Vintage

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• If you look at the various strategies available for dealing with a new technology, sticking your head in the sand is not the most plausible strategy.

  Ralph Merkle

  Technology, Decision, Looks

  "Nanotechnology: Designs for the Future". Ubiquity Interview, ubiquity.acm.org. July, 2000.

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• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

  H. L. Mencken

  Freedom, Integrity, Men

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing". Book edited by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

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• If you're reading something from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist next to some guy in his underwear writing in his basement, or his mom's basement, on text, it looks like it's equally plausible.

  Barack Obama

  Mom, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.patheos.com

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• Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

  Hannah Arendt

  Hypocrite, Evil, Hypocrisy

  'On Revolution' (1963) ch. 2

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• Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

  Hannah Arendt

  Hypocrite, Hypocrisy, Rotten

  'On Revolution' (1963) ch. 2

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• the true and the plausible are rarely the same.

  Helen McCloy

  Truth

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• when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.

  Mark Twain

  Hunting, Names, Giving

  Mark Twain (2011). “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”, p.130, Univ of California Press

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• The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

  James Bryce

  History, Historical, Use

  James Bryce (1920). “The American Commonwealth: Vol. 1: The National Government”, p.5, Jazzybee Verlag

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• What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.

  John Brunner

  People, Want, Way

  John Brunner (2014). “The Jagged Orbit”, p.18, Open Road Media

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• Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

  Salman Rushdie

  Time, Past, Reality

  Salman Rushdie (2010). “Midnight's Children”, p.229, Random House

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• As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

  Bryce Courtenay

  Believe, Heart, Men

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• The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.

  Paul Johnson

  Powerful, Earth Day, Arrogance

  Paul Johnson (1980). “The Things that are Not Caesar's”

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• Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up. But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word

  Brenda Ueland

  Believe, Hero, Ordinary

  Brenda Ueland (2013). “If You Want to Write”, p.83, Simon and Schuster

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• Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!

  H. G. Wells

  Simple, Enough, Theory

  H. G. Wells (2015). “The Time Machine: H. G. Wells Collections”, p.25, 谷月社

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• The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.

  Ian Mcewan

  Littles, Return, Details

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Atonement”, p.76, Random House

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• Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Pain, Our Society, Manipulation

  The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (2005). “The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future”, p.70, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Artist, People, Appreciate

  Kurt Vonnegut (1998). “Timequake”, p.23, Penguin

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• If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Order, People, Laughing

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• Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

  Francis Bacon

  Truth, Needs, Fiction

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• I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

  Haruki Murakami

  Hurt, Ideas, Self

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• First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not unfrequently) to our cost when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or actions. A man's look is the work of years, it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.

  William Hazlitt

  Men, Hands, Years

  "Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners". Book by William Hazlitt, 1821-1822.

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• I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.

  Adolf Hitler

  War, Giving, Victory

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• Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see - not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Sports, Business, Children

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• The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

  Bryce Courtenay

  Powerful, Thinking, Men

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