"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

James Thurber Journalism See all quotes by James Thurber →

React to this quote

More by James Thurber

“It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.”

“All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.”

“The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.”

“It's a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.”

“Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.”

“With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The future announces itself from afar. But most people are not listening. The noisy clatter of the present drowns out the tentative sound of things to come. The sound of the new does not fit old perce…"

— John W. Gardner

Politics1912–2002

#time

"The American people can be confident that this president wants to reopen the American economy as soon as we can safely and responsibly do it. But we believe, with the guidelines to open up America aga…"

— Mike Pence

Politics1959

#time

"Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is als…"

— Lee Kuan Yew

Politics1923–2015

#time

"When Paul thought about his effortless rise in the hierarchy, he sometimes, as now, felt sheepish, like a charlatan. He could handle his assignments all right, but he didn’t have what his father had, …"

— Kurt Vonnegut

Literature1922–2007

#time