A Quote by Joseph A. Schumpeter

To realize the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

Quote Topics

Barbarian Civilized Convictions Distinguishes Man Realize Relative Stand Them Validity

Quote Author

Joseph A. Schumpeter
American - Economist
February 8, 1883 - January 8, 1950

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

Leonard Woolf

Republicans stand by their convictions. Stupid, ignorant, world-destroying convictions based on disproven economic fantasies and ancient books full of primitive morality and magic people. But convictions, nonetheless.

Bill Maher

Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.

James F. Cooper

Given that we glimpse what distinguishes man from the beast, is there anything that distinguishes woman from man?

W. L. George

I have a hard time taking myself seriously. My band the New Pornographers doesn't take me seriously, which is why I love them. We can't stand up there and pretend. What we're doing is really important to me and it's my job and I love it, but I can't just stand there unflinchingly noble in front of the audience.

Neko Case

It seems to me impossible for a civilized man to love or worship, or respect the God of the Old Testament. A really civilized man, a really civilized woman, must hold such a God in abhorrence and contempt.

Robert Green Ingersoll

I've been around in public life for a long time. I think people know what I stand for. They know that I have strong convictions, committed principles and I'm prepared to stand up for them.

Malcolm Turnbull

It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

Richard M. Weaver

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

Carl Jung

Everybody was talking about the religious man who committed suicide. While no one in the monastery approved of the man's action, some say they admired his faith. Faith?" said the Master. He had the courage of his convictions, didn't he?" That was fanaticism, not faith. Faith demands a greater courage still: to reexamine one's convictions and reject them if they do not fit the facts.

Anthony de Mello

Convictions are the mainsprings of action, the driving powers of life. What a man lives are his convictions.

Francis Kelley

A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth.

Max Frisch

So strong is the power of superstition that even though we know that we have been reverencing a sham, yet still we hesitate to admit the validity of our new-found convictions.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

There is reason to believe that voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them.