Richard Steele Quotes

There can hardly, I believe, be imagined a more desirable pleasure than that of praise unmixed with any possibility of flattery.

I am surrounded by flatterers and fools. It can drive a man to madness,.. . Half of them don’t dare tell me the truth, and the other half can’t find it.

I am surrounded by flatterers and fools.

Only a fool thinks price and value are the same.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

I believe what Jesus said, but Jesus never said priests couldn't be fools.

No man of high and generous spirit is ever willing to indulge in flattery; the good may feel affection for others, but will not flatter them.

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

Being judgmental is cheap. Any fool can do it.

Flattery makes fools of the best of us.

There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

The opinion prevailed among advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed.

Most people have ears, but few have judgment; tickle those ears, and depend upon it, you will catch their judgments, such as they are.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Anyone who makes up their mind about an issue before they hear the issue is a fool.

This is one of theprimary mechanisms whereby, if a fool says the sun is shining, we do notcorrectly discard this as irrelevant nonevidence, but rather find ourselvesimpelled to say that it must be dark outside.

By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence.

The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad.

I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking your experiments. How easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.

People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.

Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you, nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

Don't Let them fool you or even try to school you

Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.