Humbug Quotes
The man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull...
C. S. Lewis
I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.
Henry Beston
I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I've done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don't like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven't a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue. You'll find that is true, Rose, when you know the world better.
Louisa May Alcott
We want to be clearly understood on this point. We are not trying to say that signs and rites are a big piece of humbug. They would be such if people did not need them; but we have to recognize that everyone has not the same degree of intelligence. Children have always had fairy stories told to them, and these stories will continue to be told as long as there are nurses and mothers. Children have faith and this is what saves them. Imagine a child of seven saying: 'I do not want to accept anything I cannot understand.' What could one teach such a monster? Accept what your teachers tell you to begin with, my fine fellow, then study it and, if you are not an idiot, you will understand it by-and-by.
Eliphas Levi
Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry ... Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.
H. G. Wells
Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon-laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution-these can lift at a colossal humbug,-push it a little-crowd it a little-weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.
Mark Twain
Brother Nabi - to a philosophical letter [he received from Denis ] a philosophical answer... [but] first of all, forgive the incoherence of my last letter. I am feeling remorsed about what I told you about Gauguin. There is no humbug about him, not, at any rate, with respect to those he knows are capable of understanding him. I have lived with him for the past fifteen days in the closest association [in Pont-Aven]. We share a room. I have told him what I dislike about his work; what I said can be regarded as a sally against the ingrained habits of contemporary painting. But let's go back to our philosophy....(a:) Immutable principles exist in art. There is a science, namely aesthetics, that teaches them. Today this science is dead. It was alive in the days of the beatific primitives...
Paul Sérusier