A Quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straghtforward men.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote Topics

Clever Geniuses Honest Men Need Plain Shall

Quote Author

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
German - Theologian
February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Crazy people who are productive are geniuses. Crazy people who are rich are eccentric. Crazy people who are neither productive nor rich are just plain crazy. Geniuses and crazy people are both out in the middle of a deep ocean; geniuses swim, crazy people drown. Most of us are sitting safely on the shore. Take a chance and get your feet wet.

Michael J. Gelb

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

W. H. Auden

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.

John F. Kennedy

So long as men shall be on earth, there will be tasks for them to do. Some way for them to show their worth. Each day shall bring its problems new. And men shall dream of mightier deeds than ever have been done before. There always shall be human needs for men to work and struggle for.

Edgar Guest

You must obey this now for a law, that he that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled). For the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers.

John Smith

I mean, I do love clever and witty, but I think that the 'Three Stooges' were geniuses. They'd have to be for their appeal to have lasted this long.

Paula Poundstone

A plain sock by itself is terribly boring, but it could score points by having a clever stitch pattern, or maybe by being made out of a very beautiful yarn that's an enchantment to work with. (Sadly, it is still infuriatingly true that being beautiful without being clever is almost worth more points than being clever without being beautiful, but such are the rules of life and knitting-they are cruel, but there anyway).

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Honest men live on charity in their age; the almshouses are full of men who never stole a copper penny. Honest men are the fools and the saints.

Taylor Caldwell

Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

Thucydides

Because one species is more clever than another, does it give it the right to imprison or torture the less clever species? Does one exceptionally clever individual have a right to exploit the less clever individuals of his own species? To say that he does is to say with the Fascists that the strong have a right to abuse and exploit the weak - might is right, and the strong and ruthless shall inherit the earth.

Richard D. Ryder

However a man who was honest and clever was always, ALWAYS more difficult to scam than someone who was both dishonest and clever. Sincerity. It was so difficult , by definition, to fake.

Brandon Sanderson

With wives, men hide behind the air of bravado, which is basically a defence mechanism, I think. Clever creatures, women. Very clever.

Les Dawson

Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.

William James

Things severed shall be united and shall acquire of themselves such virtue that they shall restore to men their lost memory: - That is the papyrus sheets, which are formed out of several strips and preserve the memory of the thoughts and deeds of men.