Blind Reverence Quotes

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.

The Pope is an idol whose hands are tied and whose feet are kissed.

I always love to quote Albert Einstein because nobody dares contradict him.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.

We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.

But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.

Many will think they may reasonably blame me by alleging that my proofs are opposed to the authority of certain men held in the highest reverence by their inexperienced judgments; not considering that my works are the issue of pure and simple experience.

The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

Of all political sacred-cows, education is the most sacred and the most cow-like.

You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.

Often, we try to raise dead leaders and bury live ones.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it.

In order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honoring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.

Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.

The worship of words is more pernicious than the worship of images. Grammatolatry is the worst species of idolatry.