Quotes About Madmen

This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.

He was astonished likewise that they did not see it was impossible for men to comprehend anything of all those wonders, seeing they who have the reputation of being most knowing in them are of quite different opinions, and can agree no better than so many fools and madmen;

It had been a phobia of his for years that someday he would fall into the hands of madmen---in particular, madmen who seemed sane up until the last moment.

Where was I to get a messenger who could carry my few chattels and my books? How could I pay him and the porter? Where was I to go? I repeated these unanswerable questions again and again, in tears, as madmen repeat their tunes. I fell asleep; poverty has for its friends heavenly slumbers full of beautiful dreams.

With a few exceptions, the media have phrased the past five months as a contest of wills between Bush and Saddam Hussein, not as a moment of deragement between two armed madmen willing to order their young to slaughter each other. Analysis -endless analysis- has been offered about the two men's tactics, as if they were coaches preparing for the Super Bowl.

In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, that madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.

If to break loose from the bounds of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing or doing the worst, be liberty, true liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen: but yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already.

Let's sum up: an unknown number of enemies with unknown capabilities, supported by a gang of madmen, packs of attack animals, and superhumanly intelligent pocket change.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

Anything but madmen, Socrates; the young men are much madder who pay them money; and madder still those, their relations, who entrust young people to them; maddest of all, the cities which allow them to come in and do not kick them

My love, she whispered, so low she sounded to Jacques as if she were speaking from the bottom of an abyss, now we shall belong to each other in a strange country that you do not know. It is the country of madmen but not the country of brutes. I am taking away your vulgar senses and giving you others more refined.

The Duke: This La Mancha—what is it like? The Governor: An empty place. Great wide plains. Prisoner: A desert. The Governor: A wasteland. The Duke: Which apparently grows lunatics. Cervantes: I would say, rather...men of illusion. The Duke: Much the same. Why are you poets so fascinated with madmen? Cervantes: I suppose...we have much in common. The Duke: You both turn your backs on life. Cervantes: We both select from life what pleases us.

The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, murder and assassination.

Pleasure is the happiness of madmen, while happiness is the pleasure of sages," wrote the French novelist and critic Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly.

Maybe madmen always rule. Maybe that's all there are.

Nearly a half century ago, while Social-Democratic and Communist theoreticians babbled about a society with "work for all," the Dadaists, those magnificent madmen, demanded unemployment for everybody.

If the world is condemned to mediocrity, if heroes are no more than statues and mythical figures and if adventure is for madmen then let us condemn ourselves to glory, let us become myth and let us be madmen, for the herd is already too numerous.

No. You should take pleasure in following the Lethani. If you fight well, you should take pride in doing a thing well. For the fighting itself you should feel only duty and sorrow. Only barbarians and madmen take pleasure in combat. Whoever loves the fight itself has left the Lethani behind.