Samuel Johnson Quotes

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.

All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to think. The trouble is that men very often resort to all sorts of devices in order not to think, because thinking is such hard work.

Most people aren't good or bad. They're naive.

there are some people who never learn; indeed, few people learn by experience, so far as I have ever seen.

People always should know better. People don't get - they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed.

Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.

For all people strive to grasp what they do not know, while none strive to grasp what they already know; and all strive to discredit what they do not excel in, while none strive to discredit what they do excel in. This is why there is chaos.

People--stupid when they lived; potentially stupid when they died.

It is in human nature to relax, when not compelled by personal advantage or disadvantage.

I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

The rich are too indolent, the poor too weak, to bear the insupportable fatigue of thinking.

People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.

People say life ain't fairlife is very fair. People aren't fairpeople are terrible.

To exercise is human; not to is divine.

All is egotism. The only people whose mainspring is not egotism are the dead and perhaps idiots.

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

When people start talking about their bowel movements, they are inexorable as the processes of which they speak.

People are stupider than anybody.

People are bloody ignorant apes.

Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.

I believe that women are many different types of people. There are brave women, there are cowardly women, there are altruistic women, there are selfish women. Most people are a combination of the same.

The heartbeat of your originality is deep within a body of thought that continually wrestles with the contradictions and limitations that we're constantly trying to overcome, the curiosities and the ignorances of the people we seek to help.

When it comes to people -- don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.

Most humans recognize their ruin, but they carry on regardless.