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1 " Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?" " I've felt it all my life," she said. "
2 " Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God. "
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
3 " By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Abolition of Man
4 " For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head. "
5 " It is hard to feel affection for something as totally impersonal as the atmosphere, and yet there it is, as much a part and product of life as wine and bread. Taken all in al, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion. The word 'chance' does not serve to account well for structures of such magnificence...We should credit it for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.It breathes for us, and it does another thing for our pleasure. Each day, millions of meteorites fall against the outer limits of the membrane and are burned to nothing by the friction. Without this shelter, our surface would long since have become the pounded powder of the moon. Even though our receptors are not sensitive enough to hear it, there is comfort in knowing the sound is there overhead, like the random noise of rain on the roof at night. "
― Lewis Thomas , The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
6 " By declaring our Prophet infallible and not permitting ourselves to question him, we Muslims had set up a static tyranny. The Prophet Muhammad attempted to legislate every aspect of life. By adhering to his rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, we Muslims supressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose. We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of the Arab desert in the seventh century. We were not just servants of Allah, we were slaves. "
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali , Infidel
7 " Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like... We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. Right practice rather then right belief. That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. "
8 " A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help. "
― Irving Stone , The Agony and the Ecstasy
9 " There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting?The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule. "
― Ted Hughes , Poetry in the Making: An Anthology
10 " Let us treat Women as our equals, (says [the 'blubblering dotard' xD Cato]) and they will immediately want to become our mistresses." 'Tis Cato says it, and therefore there needs no proof. Besides, to oblige men to prove all they advance by reason, wou'd be imposing silence upon them; a grievance to which they are perhaps full as unequal as they pretend we are. But granting Cato to be infallible in his assertions, what then? Have not Women as much right to be mistresses, as the Men have to be masters? No, says Cato. But why? Because they have not. Such convincing arguments must make us fond of hearing him farther. If we make the Women our equals, " they will demand that to-morrow as a tribute, which they receive to-day as a grace." But where is the grace in granting us a share in what we have an equal right to? Have not the Women an equal claim to power and dignity with the Men? "
11 " I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge, when times is pressing and one needs to make a snap judgment, whether or not some sexist bullshit is afoot. Obviously, it’s not 100% infallible but by and large it definitely points you in the right direction and it's asking this question; are the men doing it? Are the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this, as it's letting the side down? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating retarded, time-wasting, bullshit? Is this making Jeremy Clarkson feel insecure?Almost always the answer is no. The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way, they are just getting on with stuff. "
― Caitlin Moran , How to Be a Woman
12 " Here then is an infallible criterion, by which the nation may judge of the intentions of those who govern it ... if they corrupt the morals of the people, spread a taste for luxury, effeminacy, a rage for licentious pleasures, - if they stimulate the higher orders to a ruinous pomp and extravagance, - beware, citizens! beware of those corruptors! they only aim at purchasing slaves in order to exercise over them an arbitrary sway. "
13 " Belief in an infallible God does not make one infallible. "
― John Corvino , What's Wrong With Homosexuality?
14 " To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare. "
― Comte de Lautréamont , Maldoror and the Complete Works
15 " Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily. "
― Oliver Sacks , The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
16 " Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide. "
― Agatha Christie , The A.B.C. Murders (Hercule Poirot, #12)
17 " Jen's emotions, strong but invisible within an infallible Miran facade, raged with contempt. He'd met the man responsible for such despicable exploitation of his brother's life onboard the Aquarius. He didn't like him then.He hated him now. "
― Marcha A. Fox , A Psilent Place Below (Star Trails Tetralogy #3)
18 " People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt... They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear "
― Ayn Rand , Atlas Shrugged
19 " Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire...They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. "
20 " Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead. "
― Jonathan Swift
