“‘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
“I am quite sure your Majesty played as successfully as usual.”
A character in The Man in the Iron Mask (the 1977 movie)
“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
In my latest LooniePolitics column I say budgets have become so routinely vote-buying exercises that people cheer or boo depending if they get a good price for theirs not because they think it’s a good or bad idea to loot the Treasury for private gain.
“Study history, study history – in history lie all the secrets of statecraft.”
Winston Churchill to the author, then an 18-year-old exchange student (in the receiving line at the May 1953 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association), quoted in James C. Humes Nixon’s Ten Commandments of Statecraft