This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.
He [John Adams] is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. That is all the ill that can be said of him.
When the sage points at the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.
There's a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They'd rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.
If a person cannot foresee the consequences of his act, and is not capable of understanding what he is told about its outcome by those with more experience, it is impossible for him to guide his act intelligently. In such a state, every act is alike to him.
Fools, they do not even know how much more is the half than the whole.
I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It's the page nobody ever reads and it's even worse because it doesn't tell you who anybody really is.
Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.
Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.
Stupid. Stupid. Foaly, we are both imbeciles. I don't expect lateral thinking from the LEP, but from you..." ... "What is it?" [Holly] asked, afraid of the answer, which must surely be terrible. "Yeah," agreed Foaly, who always had time to feel insulted. "Why am I an imbecile?
Yeah, it's disturbing when someone has no self-awareness.
The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.
Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
If the wise erred not, it would goe hard with fooles. [If the wise erred not, it would go hard with fools.]
People who are criticizing... don't really get it, because if they did, they would like it.
It's okay if you can't see what you're doing, cuz even when your eyes are open, you can't see what you're doing.
Yet here I stand poor fool what more, not one wit wiser than before.
For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.
Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it's in there.
There's many a man has more hair than wit.
The foolish and vulgar are always accustomed to value equally the good and the bad.
It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.
All the time I had my success, I didn't know what I was doing. I struggled and struggled and hacked things out without any insight as to why.
Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.
He is a fool who only sees the mischiefs that are past.
