A Quote by Anatole France

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Anatole France

Quote Topics

Certainty Cruel Makes Men Possess Truth

Quote Author

Anatole France
French - Novelist
April 16, 1844 - October 12, 1924

The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Little men are dissolved in it. If there is any gold, truth makes it shine more brightly. . . .Truth, even in the mouth of an informer, a spy, a briber, can become bigger than anybody who tries to destroy it. Truth survives.

Adela Rogers St. Johns

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

Herbert Agar

Gambling makes boys selfish and cruel as well as men.

Thomas Hughes

I think it is wrong to expect certainties in this world, where all else but God that is Truth is an uncertainty. All that appears and happens about and around us is uncertain, transient. But there is a Supreme Being hidden therein as a Certainty, and one would be blessed if one could catch a glimpse of that Certainty and hitch one's waggon to it. The quest for that Truth is the summum bonum of life.

Mahatma Gandhi

Possessions can possess you. Even a lawn can possess you. It makes you buy a garden hose. Which makes you water. Which cuts into time you might be happier spending some other way.

Orson Bean

Certainty is a cruel mindset.

Ellen Langer

Religion gives you a sense of certainty. It makes you feel that you have the right answers to really big questions and that you've grasped the truth.

James Heckman

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

Jack London

Religion gives you a sense of certainty. It makes you feel that you have the right answers to really big questions and that youve grasped the truth.

James Heckman

The best kind of men have a certainty in themselves that isn't done in when countered by a certainty in their women, and they are much adored.

Merle Shain

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.

Thomas Paine

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

[I]f in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics, in so far as disposed through it we are able to reach certainty in other sciences and truth by the exclusion of error.