Human Folly Quotes

Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as a means and human folly as an end.

History, in fact, is no more than a list of the crimes of humanity, human follies and accidents

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

What you mean by 'peace' is nothing more than the endless repetition of human folly.

Prayer girds human weakness with divine strength, turns human folly into heavenly wisdom, and gives to troubled mortals the peace of God. We know not what prayer can do.

The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

There are three things in life which are real: God, human folly and laughter. Since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.

Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergymen in politics?

[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth. The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue's game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying, like so much horse-physic!! Gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage, and breeding a deformed progeny of unnatural conclusions!

History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly.

I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.