“Of what use is a dream if not a blueprint for courageous action?”
Bruce Wayne in Batman (the 1966 movie)
Machiavelli’s advice about walking in the footsteps of the great “makes two points: first, that we’re bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it’s the only data base we have and second, that we might as well try to do so systematically. E.H. Carr... observed, in What Is History?, that the size and reasoning capacity of the human brain are probably no greater now than they were five thousand years ago, but that very few human beings live now as they did then.... ‘History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another.’”
John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History
“[D]o not men die fast enough, without destroying each other?"
Francois de Salignac, The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses
“Man sets self ablaze using chainsaw to open gas tank”
Headline in Ottawa Citizen April 20, 2006 furnishing conclusive proof of the human capacity for folly
“‘I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism. – Roberto Rossellini; 1906-1977”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2238066-i-am-not-a-pessimist-to-perceive-evil-where-it
“Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think, must frequently suffer from ennui. It was perhaps affectation in Socrates to say, that all he had learned to know was that he knew nothing. But surely it is a mark of wisdom, to be sensible of the limited extent of human knowledge, and to examine with reverence the ways of GOD, nor presumptuously reject any opinion which has been held by the judicious and the learned, because it has been made a cloak for artifice, or had a variety of fictions raised on it, by credulity.”
James Boswell, Esq. The Journal of a Tour To Corsica; & Memoirs of Pascal Paoli
“The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way.”
Josh Billings quoted at www.brainyquote.com/quotes/josh_billings_141132
“How come dumb stuff seems so smart while you’re doing it?”
Dennis the Menace, quoted in NCC Overview Winter 2002