Imbecility Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Expectations, Assuming, Granted

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• Rage is mental imbecility.

  Hosea Ballou

  Rage

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• It's true, I do love the semi-epiphany. For example, in "Fall Line," the character's final decision is less epiphany than imbecility. He makes a choice, which the conflict hangs upon - whether to seek fame or actually change his life - and so, his decision is tied to the central conflict and his own hubris.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Fall, Character, Decision

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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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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• Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.

  H. L. Mencken

  Wise, Men, Foolish Man

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• For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity's most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one's fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve.

  Rebecca West

  War, Fighting, Men

  Rebecca West (2010). “The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews”, p.143, Open Road Media

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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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• 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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• The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Cunning, Cleverness, Misers

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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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• That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.

  H. L. Mencken

  Race, Prejudice, Arguing

  H. L. Mencken (2015). “In Defense of Women: Human Sexuality”, p.7, 谷月社

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

  Tristan Tzara

  Art, Literature, Journalism

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Atheist, Religion, Atheism

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• The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Thinking, Long

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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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