C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Prejudice
Prejudice is the reason of fools.
Prejudice is the twin of illiberality.
The multitude are ruled by prejudices.
All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
Remember, when the judgment is weak the prejudice is strong.
There is nothing stronger than human prejudice.
Prejudices are what rule the vulgar crowd.
He hears but half who hears one party only.
Prejudice squints when it looks, and lies when it talks.
Much of our ignorance is of ourselves. Our eyes are full of dust. Prejudice blinds us.
Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.
When we destroy an old prejudice, we have need of a new virtue.
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest violence.
How immense to us appear the sins we have not committed.
Prejudice assumes the garb of reason, but the cheat is too this.
Prejudice, which sees what it pleases, cannot see what is plain.
Ignorance is less remote from the truth than prejudice.
Women have fewer vices than men; but they have stronger prejudices.
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
Never suffer the prejudice of the eye to determine the heart.
Prejudice is a house-plant which is very apt to wilt if you take it out-of-doors among folks.
We seldom find persons whom we acknowledge to be possessed of good sense, except those who agree with us in opinion.
National antipathy is the basest, because the most illiberal and illiterate of all prejudices.
To divest one’s self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.
He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.
People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.
Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own.
To all intents and purposes, he who will not open his eyes is, for the present, as blind as he who cannot.
Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world and ignorance of mankind.
Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times?
How tartly that gentleman looks! I never can see him but I am heart-burned an hour after.
Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.
They who, without any previous knowledge of us, think amiss of us, do us no harm: they attack not us, but the phantom of their own imagination.
To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near to laudable that they have been often praised and are always pardoned.
The rabble estimate few things according to their real value, most things according to their prejudices.
The prejudices of youth pass away with it. Those of old age last only because there is no other age to be hoped for.
Even when we fancy we have grown wiser, it is only, it may be, that new prejudices have displaced old ones.
As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.
The eyes of a man in the jaundice make yellow observations on everything; and the soul tinctured with any passion diffuses a false color over the appearance of things.
They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions.
There is nothing stronger than human prejudice, A crazy sentimentalism, like that of Peter the Hermit, hurled half of Europe upon Asia, and changed the destinies of kingdoms.
Prejudice is a mist, which in our journey through the world often dims the brightest and obscures the best of all the good and glorious objects that meet us on our way.
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second wilfully preferred.
None are too wise to be mistaken, but few are so wisely just as to acknowledge and correct their mistakes, and especially the mistakes of prejudice.
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
The prejudices of men emanate from the mind, and may be overcome; the prejudices of women emanate from the heart and are impregnable.
To lay aside all prejudice is to lay aside all principles. He who is destitute of principles is governed, theoretically and practically, by whims.
Removing prejudices is, alas! too often removing the boundary of a delightful near prospect in order to let in a shockingly extensive one.
Prejudice is an equivocal term; and may as well mean right opinions taken upon trust and deeply rooted in the mind, as false and absurd opinions so derived, and grown into it.
Reasoning against a prejudice is like fighting against a shadow; it exhausts the reasoner, without visibly affecting the prejudice. Argument cannot do the work of instruction any more than blows can take the place of sunlight.
Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence.
Because a total eclipse of the sun is above my own head, I will not therefore insist that there must be an eclipse in America also; and because snowflakes fall before my own nose, I need not believe that the Gold Coast is snowed up also.
Prejudice may be considered as a continual false medium of viewing things, for prejudiced persons not only never speak well, but also never think well, of those whom they dislike, and the whole character and conduct is considered with an eye to that particular thing which offends them.
There are truths which some men despise because they have not examined, and which they will not examine because they despise. There is one signal instance on record where this kind of prejudice was overcome by a miracle; but the age of miracles is past, while that of prejudice remains.
Prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same. Prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.
The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.
When prejudices are caught up from bad passions, the worst of men feel intervals of remorse to soften and disperse them; but when they arise from a generous though mistaken source, they are hugged closer to the bosom, and the kindest and most compassionate natures feel a pleasure in fostering a blind and unjust resentment.
Every one is forward to complain of the prejudices that mislead other men and parties, as if he were free, and had none of his own. This being objected on all sides, it is agreed that it is a fault and a hindrance to knowledge. What now is the cure? No other but this, that every man should let alone others’ prejudices and examine his own.
Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Some persons believe everything that their kindred, their parents, and their tutors believe. The veneration and the love which they have for their ancestors incline them to swallow down all their opinions at once, without examining what truth or falsehood there is in them. Men take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.