A Quote by Jesse Ball

That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!

Jesse Ball

Quote Topics

Anyone Certainty Death False False Hope Hopes Know Offered Recognize Refuse Would Would Be

Quote Author

Jesse Ball
American - Novelist
Born: June 7, 1978

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

John Stuart Mill

It's not so much religion per se, it's false certainty that worries me, and religion just has more than its fair share of false certainty or dogmatism. I'm really concerned when I see people pretending to know things they clearly cannot know.

Sam Harris

... moral certainty is certainty which is sufficient to regulate our behaviour, or which measures up to the certainty we have on matters relating to the conduct of life which we never normally doubt, though we know that it is possible, absolutely speaking, that they may be false.

Rene Descartes

Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality ... the silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

Dan Simmons

Neither refuse to give help when it is needed,... nor refuse to accept it when it is offered.

Lloyd Alexander

I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.

Freya Stark

Material possessions, in themselves, are good. We would not survive for long without money, clothing and shelter. We must eat in order to stay alive. Yet if we are greedy, if we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, then we make our possessions into a false god. How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can! But this is to make possessions into a false god. Instead of bringing life, they bring death.

Pope Benedict XVI

You mustn't expect prime ministers to enjoy themselves. If they do, they mustn't show it - the population would be horrified.

Edward Heath

Never refuse a breath mint - you don't know why it's being offered.

Dana Perino

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it.

Learned Hand

Those who say they dislike dogma, or 'certainty', tend to be liars, hypocrites, or simply wrong. What they really dislike is the dogma of those they disagree with. A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas.

Jonah Goldberg

Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.

Alexander Hamilton

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.

James A. Michener

America is a nation with many flaws that only the stupid would deny, but with hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.

James A. Michener

This surpassed the fear of death. Death would be a mercy if it would make the feeling stop, the uncontrollable panic mingling with the mind-scrambling certainty of something sinister approaching, something with no need to hurry, something that would not be so kind as to let him die. The fear was palpable, suffocating, irresistible.