A Quote by Vaclav Havel

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them - isn’t this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?

Vaclav Havel

Quote Topics

After Besides Distrust Doubt Harmful Horrors Intellectual Less Might No Doubt Slumber Than Them True Trust Vocation Within Words

Quote Author

Vaclav Havel
Czechoslovakian - Leader
Born: October 5, 1936

There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them.

Vaclav Havel

Between 1776 and 1789, Americans replaced a government over them with a government under them. They have worried ever since about keeping it under. Distrust of its powers has been more common and more visible than distrust of the imperial authority of England ever was before the Revolution.

Edmund Morgan

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

Dorothy L. Sayers

The reason we do not let our friends see the very bottom of our hearts is not so much distrust of them as distrust of ourselves.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Bend words. Stretch them, squash them, mash them up, fold them. Turn them over or swing them upside down. Make up new words. Leave a place for the strange and downright impossible ones. Use ancient words. Hold on to the gangly, silly, slippy, truthful, dangerous, out-of-fashion ones.

Kyo Maclear

The ambiguous, gray areas of authority and responsibility between parents and teachers exacerbate the distrust between them. The distrust is further complicated by the fact that it is rarely articulated, but usually remains smoldering and silent.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

I want you to understand the words. I want you taste the words. I want you to love the words. Because the words are important. But they're only words. You leave them on the paper and you take the thoughts and put them into your mind and then you as an actor recreate them, as if the thoughts had suddenly occurred to you.

Daws Butler

Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful. Kind words also produce their own image on men's souls; and a beautiful image it is. They smooth, and quiet, and comfort the hearer.

Blaise Pascal

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

Pablo Neruda

To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.

James Bovard

I trust my instincts. I don't distrust them. They haven't led me astray. It's when I've made up my mind to be efficient that is when I have gone wrong.

Dorothea Lange

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

Seneca the Younger

What we're trying to do in conversational intelligence is not only define that trust continuum for people, not only helping them notice, which is so important, what's happening in them and others when distrust lives, but also how to bring people in trust. When they do, what happens, this part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex is loaded with wisdom, integrity, strategy, insights, empathy, foresight. It's beautiful. It's so designed for that, and often it's turned off because people don't have trust with each other.

Judith E. Glaser

When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you.

Niccolo Machiavelli

'Writing' is the wrong way to describe what happens to words in a movie. First, you put down words. Then you rehearse them with actors. Then you shoot the words. Then you edit them. You cut a lot of them, you fudge them, you make up new ones in voice-over. Then you cut it and throw it all away.