The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you ...can fool all of the people all of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History of Ireland--lawlessness and turbulency, robbery and oppression, hatred and revenge, blind selfishness everywhere--no princ...iple, no heroism. What can be done with it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they re...cruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in hi...s assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point... of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting--the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Insurance. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beat...ing the man who keeps the table.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To abolish a status, which in all ages God has sanctioned, and man has continued, would not only be robbery to an innumerable clas...s of our fellow-subjects; but it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a much happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West-Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great lead...er who is just entering the room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When once--which every body must be--you are convinced of the wickedness and deceit of men, it is impossible to preserve untainted... your own innocence of heart. Experience will prove the depravity of mankind, and the conviction of it only serves to create distrust, suspicion--caution--and sometimes causelessly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »