Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
VoltaireRead
To a toad what is beauty? A female with two lovely pop-eyes, a wide mouth, yellow belly, and green spotted back.
Interpretation
Beauty is subjective and varies significantly across different perspectives and experiences.
In this quote, Voltaire emphasizes the idea that beauty is not universal but instead dependent on individual perception. He uses the example of a toad's perspective, illustrating that what one finds beautiful can vary drastically from another's viewpoint, ultimately reflecting the diversity of standards by which beauty is judged in nature and society.
In practice
In a discussion about beauty standards in different cultures.
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
Storms rumble beyond the horizon, and the fires of heaven purge the earth. There is no salvation without destruction, no hope this side of death.
I am an Addictive Personality, they say, a natural slave to passion - and many Doctors have warned me against it. I am a High-risk Patient.
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don't think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.
Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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