Jules Feiffer Quotes

Unfortunately, most college kids these days aren't coming from any place-they seem to ask the same kind of questions over and over again.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short... if one follows patterns.

An actor always goes to the safe side.

Mediocre theoretical physicists make no progress. They spend all their time understanding other people's progress.

In every respect the burden is hard on those who attack an almost universal opinion. They must be very fortunate well as unusually capable if they obtain a hearing at all.

Where all think alike, none thinks very much.

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating of conformity.

The Yesees said yes to anything That anyone suggested. The Noees said no to everything Unless it was proven and tested. So the Yesees all died of much too much And the Noees all died of fright, But somehow I think the Thinkforyourselfees All came out all right.

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority

I spent my whole career playing it safe, being a gentleman, never doing anything controversial.

The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.

Beware of advice-even this.

Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put.

Skepticism requires disbelief and curiosity, not conformity to conventional wisdom. There's no science here. This is pure politics.

I realize that we all do express ourselves, but those who express that which is always being done are those whose thinking is almost in every way in accord with everyone else. Expression on this basis has become dull to those who wish to think for themselves.

If the human intellect is allowed to impose a preconceived pattern on society, if our powers of reasoning are allowed to lay claim to a monopoly of creative effort... then we must not be surprised if society, as such, ceases to function as a creative force.

The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?

It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.

There is nothing so wrong as accepting a thing merely because men who have done things say it should be so.

When you don't know the rules, you break them all. It's hard to take big risks when you know the history of an industry and what has worked and what didn't.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.