A Quote by Lord Chesterfield

Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known than their crimes.

Lord Chesterfield

Quote Topics

Imperfections Known Men More Much Than Unwilling Weaknesses

Quote Author

Lord Chesterfield
British - Celebrity
September 22, 1694 - March 24, 1773

Men are much more unwilling to have their weaknesses and their imperfections known, than their crimes; and, if you hint to a man that you think him silly, ignorant, or even ill-bred or awkward, he will hate you more, and longer, than if you tell him plainly that you think him a rogue.

Lord Chesterfield

Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity. [Fr., Les hommes rougissent moins de leur crimes que de leurs faiblesses et de leur vanite.]

Jean de la Bruyere

Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity.

Jean de la Bruyere

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Isaac Asimov

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort — as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

Robert Green Ingersoll

If I had read as much as other men I would have known no more than they.

Thomas Hobbes

All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

...sitting and waiting is one of the most miserable occupations known to man - not that it usually is known to men; women do it much more often.

Diana Gabaldon

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

Marian Wright Edelman

One's conscience reproaches one much more stingingly for one's follies than one's crimes.

Geraldine Jewsbury

Cruelty is no more the cure of crimes than it is the cure of sufferings; compassion, in the first instance, is good for both; I have known it to bring compunction when nothing else would.

Walter Savage Landor

We're more sexually repressed than men, having been given a much more strict puritanical code of behavior than men ever have.

Kate Millett

Occupy yourself in beholding and bewailing your own imperfections rather than contemplating the imperfections of others.

Saint Ignatius

Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?

Thomas Browne

Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Even though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than most people who drink.