Quotes About Folly

But in our dislike of the individual do not let us mistake the diagnosis of his disease. He suffers not from ignorance but from stupidity. Give him learning and you make him not wise, but only more pretentious in his folly.

Folly is like the growth of weeds, always luxurious and spontaneous; wisdom, like flowers, requires cultivation.

Beauty and folly are generally companions.

To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she is operating in your interest or in that of your wife.

Their three outstanding attitudes-obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status-are persistent aspects of folly.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.

The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims "incapable of rational choice" and blind to distinctions of morality and expedience.

Folly is a child of power.

The limitation prompting folly " was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age. "Nothing is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present

folly when it is a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrably unworkable or counter-productive. It

One cannot quarrel with religious beliefs, especially of a strange, remote, half-understood culture. But when the beliefs become a delusion maintained against natural evidence to the point of losing the independence of a people, they may fairly be called folly.

The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.

Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?

I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.

Thus through the folly of a single hot-headed general, whose offensive spirit was not balanced by judgment, the Empire suffered a blow from which it never recovered-although it had sufficient power of endurance to survive, in a diminished form, for a further four hundred years.

Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?

What a folly is it now, he instantly resumed, leaving the general and attacking a particular, to think to make people good by promises and threats--promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in the human system!

Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying him!

She had not yet such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them.

No one who wants to enjoy a walk in the rain must carry an umbrella; it is pure folly.

you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgment years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there's an end to it.

All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.