Humbug Quotes

We learn and experience ourselves only through suffering; everything else is humbug. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

The Great and Terrible Humbug, ~ L. Frank Baum

A politician is required to listen to humbug, talk humbug, condone humbug. The most we can hope for is that we don't actually believe it. ~ P.D. James

I am glad that the country world ... retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor. ~ Henry Beston

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. ~ George Orwell

Let us not foist this humbug on the world. ~ Ryan Shawcross

The greater part of your misogamy is venal; the other cause of your invective humbug is that you're a muggish homuncle who couldn't raise a flickering ember in a vagabond-laced mutton. ~ Edward Dahlberg

[T]hey somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug. ~ Charles Dickens

Back to Basics was absolute humbug, wasn't it? ~ Edwina Currie

There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word. ~ George MacDonald

You're more than that," said the Scarecrow, in a grieved tone; "you're a humbug." "Exactly so!" declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. "I am a humbug. ~ L. Frank Baum

The Victorian Age, for all its humbug, was a period of rapid progress, because men were dominated by hope rather than fear. If we are again to have progress, we must again be dominated by hope. ~ Bertrand Russell

There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things--broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution-- these can lift at a colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage. ~ Mark Twain

Real merit requires as much labor, to be placed in a true light, as humbug to be elevated to an unworthy eminence; only the success of the false is temporary, that of the true, immortal. ~ Francis Alexander Durivage

Ossip, I think you are a humbug ... you are not even a doctor. But you are funny. Your notion of a humanity universally putting out the tongue and taking the pill from pole to pole at the bidding of a few solemn jokers is worthy of the prophet ... ~ Joseph Conrad

He gave me a look, but in the dusk I couldn't make out very well what it conveyed. Then he bent over his mother, kissing her. "My news isn't particularly satisfactory. I'm going for you." "Oh you humbug!" she replied. But she was of course delighted. CHAPTER ~ Henry James

There is a downside to having one of the biggest-selling albums ever. ~ Carole King

As soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

We have seen the future, and the future is ours. ~ Cesar Chavez

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug. ~ Edouard Manet

Inside, the festivities would continue, probably well into the night, with flirtation and merriment and gratuitous use of mistletoe. It was an inexpressibly wearying thought. ~ Lauren Willig

Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him. ~ Oscar Wilde

The humorist has a good eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Puddleglum!" said Jill. "You're a regular old humbug. You sound as doleful as a funeral and I believe you're perfectly happy. And you talk as if you were afraid of everything, when you're really as brave as - as a lion. ~ C.S. Lewis

Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?"
"Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped.
"I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him. ~ Norton Juster

Trelawney," said the doctor, "contrary to all my notions, I believe you have managed to get two honest men on board with you
that man and John Silver."
Silver, if you like," cried the squire, "but as for that intolcrable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I am not anti-English, I am not anti-British, I am not anti-any Government, but I am anti-untruth, anti-humbug and anti-injustice. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There is such a mistaken notion abroad in this country that the individual who makes sharp remarks must be sincere, while the one who says pleasant things must be more or less a humbug. ~ J. E. Buckrose

I would, like any other scientist, willingly change my mind if the evidence led me to do so. So I care about what's true, I care about evidence, I care about evidence as the reason for knowing what is true. It is true that I come across rather passionate sometimes and that's because I am passionate about the truth ... I do get very impatient with humbug, with cant, with fakery, with charlatans. ~ Richard Dawkins

I don't care much whether I ever get to know anything - but I want to work out something in figures - something that hasn't got to do with human beings. I don't want people particularly. In some ways, Henry, I'm a humbug - I mean, I'm not what you all take me for. I'm not domestic, or very practical or sensible, really.And if I could calculate things, and use a telescope, and have to work out figures, and know to a fraction where I was wrong, I should be perfectly happy, and I believe I should give William all he wants. ~ Virginia Woolf

Calm and silent and steady work, and no newspaper humbug, no name-making, you must always remember. ~ Swami Vivekananda

But that's just as bad," protested Milo. "You mean just as good," corrected the Humbug. "Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things." "I don't know which side of anything to look at," protested Milo. "Everything is so confusing and all your words only make things worse. ~ Norton Juster

The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states. ~ Charles Dickens

If I don't save her from the hands of that humbug," he said, aloud, as he went to bed, "she is lost. But I shall save her."
He put out his lamp and felt a need to insult Erik in the dark. Thrice over, he shouted:
"Humbug! ... Humbug! ... Humbug! ~ Gaston Leroux

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand. ~ Mark Twain

I knew, on some level, that what I was seeing was the real Oz. I had pulled back the curtain and stepped through it, but instead of finding a humbug wizard, I'd found the controls to the whole operation - and it turned out the whole operation was made out of what appeared to be magical silly string. ~ Danielle Paige

An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style. ~ Alan K. Simpson

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~ Mark Twain

The man is a humbug - a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: Walter Helwich merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull ... ~ C.S. Lewis

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug. ~ Max Frisch

It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were "ladies" - namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedom. The psycho-political tacit here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman's role in what Veblen called "vicarious consumption" was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve ... To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman's Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation. ~ Kate Millett

It's completely logical," explained the Dodecahedron. "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic, that's all. Suppose you had something and added something to it. What would that make?"
"More," said Milo quickly.
"Quite correct," he nodded. "Now suppose you had something and added nothing to it. What would you have?"
"The same," he answered again, without much conviction.
"Splendid," cried the Dodecahedron. "And suppose you had something and added less than nothing to it. What would you have then?"
"FAMINE!" roared the anguished Humbug, who suddenly realized that that was exactly what he'd eaten twenty-three bowls of. ~ Norton Juster

I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that's when you come over all humbug. It's happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you ... ~ Colin Firth

I actually hate Christmas," says Eileen. "Everybody has this idea you have to have a good time, like happiness comes in a ruddy packet." Her face is flushed with heat. "One time, I stayed in bed all day. That was one of my best Christmases. ~ Rachel Joyce

Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity, appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data-processing mechanisms. If we develop an algorithm that fulfils the same function better, human experiences will lose their value. Thus if we can replace not just taxi drivers and doctors but also lawyers, poets and musicians with superior computer programs, why should we care if these programs have no consciousness and no subjective experiences? If some humanist starts adulating the sacredness of human experience, Dataists would dismiss such sentimental humbug. 'The experience you praise is just an outdated biochemical algorithm. In the African savannah 70,000 years ago, that algorithm was state-of-the-art. Even in the twentieth century it was vital for the army and for the economy. But soon we will have much better algorithms. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Love is a farce; matrimony is a humbug; husbands are domestic Napoleons, Neroes, Alexanders,
sighing for other hearts to conquer, after they are sure of yours. ~ Fanny Fern

The Press will not be free to tell lies. That is not freedom for the people, but a tyranny over their minds and souls. Much humbug is talked on this subject. What is press freedom? In practice it means the right of a dew millionaires to corner newspaper shares on the stock exchange and to voice their own opinions and interests, irrespective of the truth or of the national interest. ~ Oswald Mosley

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face -- that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat -- that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real ~ G.K. Chesterton

The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance. ~ Conrad Black

Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry. ~ H.G.Wells

Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretence and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer. ~ Isambard Kingdom Brunel

It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it. ~ Charles Dickens

Tell him next, that crimes cause their own detection. There's another bit of copy-book morality for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection. What infernal humbug! ~ Wilkie Collins

I shan't mind if you don't," he agreed. "But I'll not let you go, Prudence. Til not pester you, but know this: I will wait until you choose to listen to your heart."
"Pshaw." It was a feeble effort. She took a deep breath and tried again. "Humbug! How can you presume to know my heart?"
He smiled a slow, devastating smile. "You are my heart." He lifted her hand and kissed it. "And our hearts beat in tune. I know it - I, who used not to believe in such things. And you know it. ~ Anne Gracie

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse! ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. ~ H.G.Wells

But I'm afraid it can't be done."
"Certainly not; it can't be done," repeated the Humbug.
"Why not?" asked Milo.
"Why not indeed?" exclaimed the bug, who seemed equally at home on either side of an argument.
"Much too difficult," replied the king.
"Of course," emphasized the bug, "much too difficult."
"You could if you really wanted to," insisted Milo.
"By all means, if you really wanted to, you could," the Humbug agreed.
"How?" asked Azaz, glaring at the bug.
"How?" inquired Milo, looking the same way.
"A simple task," began the Humbug, suddenly wishing he were somewhere else, "for a brave lad with a stout heart, a steadfast dog, and a serviceable small automobile. ~ Norton Juster

It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war, and not a game ... If there were none of this magnanimity business in warfare, we should never go to war, except for something worth facing certain death for. ~ Leo Tolstoy

India is constipated with a lot of humbug. Take religion. For the Hindu, it means little besides caste and cow-protection. For the Muslim, circumcision and kosher meat. For the Sikh, long hair and hatred of the Muslim. For the Christian, Hinduism with a sola topee. For the Parsi, fire-worship and feeding vultures. Ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed. ~ Khushwant Singh

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug; but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm. ~ George Eliot

Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things.
- Humbug ~ Norton Juster

Sensitive, humbug. Everybody thinks I'm sensitive. Wait until they hear my new album. ~ Carole King

Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age. ~ Alfred Nobel

No great work can be achieved by humbug. It is through love, a passion for truth, and tremendous energy, that all undertakings are accomplished. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The bigger the humbug, the better people will like it. ~ P.T. Barnum

People don't like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug. ~ Edmond De Goncourt

The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself. ~ Carl Jung

Exactly so!" declared the little man, rubbing his hands together as if it pleased him. "I am a humbug." "But ~ L. Frank Baum

Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. ~ Mark Twain

We must have humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn't get on without humbug. ~ Charles Dickens

Mary Jane she set at the head of the table, with Susan alongside of her, and said how bad the biscuits was, and how mean the preserves was, and how ornery and tough the fried chickens was - and all that kind of rot, the way women always do for to force out compliments; and the people all knowed everything was tiptop, and said so - said 'How do you get biscuits to brown so nice?' and 'Where, for the land's sake, did you get these amaz'n pickles?' and all that kind of humbug talky-talk, just the way people always does at a supper, you know. ~ Mark Twain

I don't know what's the matter with you," she observed to him once; "but I suspect you're a great humbug. ~ Henry James

Scrooge replied that the calendar was an arbitrary governor of a man's life and that the new year began anew whenever one decided to live his life in a new way. ~ Charlie Lovett

How can you see something that isn't there?" yawned the Humbug, who wasn't fully awake yet.
"Sometimes, it's much simpler than seeing things that are,"he said. "For instance, if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones."
"Then where is Reality?" barked Tock.
"Right here,"cried Alec, waving his arms. ~ Norton Juster

So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed.
Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the ~ Salman Rushdie