There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, whic...h he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics.... Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey ...his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too "personal" style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The political mind] is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeur... at another time. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driv...en to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without rem...ark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are co...arse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Por...tland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-dest...ruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »