Quotes & Sayings About Humbug

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

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

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

Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with. — Josh Billings

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 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

If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug. — Henrik Ibsen

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

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

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

[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one. — George Orwell

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

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

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

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

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

I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'
her face was on a sudden distraught with pain
'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart. — W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

Every solitary one of these aristocratic conspirators and would-be murderers claims to be an arch-patriot; every one of them insists that the war is being waged to make the world safe for democracy. What humbug! What rot! What false pretense! These autocrats, these tyrants, these red-handed robbers and murderers, the "patriots," while the men who have the courage to stand face to face with them, speak the truth, and fight for their exploited victims-they are the disloyalists and traitors. If this be true, I want to take my place side by side with the traitors in this fight. — Eugene V. Debs

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

I still vote civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime. — Isabella L. Bird

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

I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I've done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don't like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven't a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue. — Louisa May Alcott

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

Why don't they live in Illusions?' suggested the Humbug. 'It's much prettier.'
'Many of them do,' he answered, walking in the direction of the forest once again, 'but it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is. — Norton Juster

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

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

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

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

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

I am not writing to flatter paternal egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth. — Charlotte Bronte

How can I help being a humbug ... when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can't be done? — L. Frank Baum

I have found life highly competitive. I accept it. It is useless, merely a hypocritical humbug, to sincerely wish your opponent to win. If you are out to win you are better not wanting to know your opponent, much less grow to like him - and wish him, honestly success over you. I have never functioned that way. — Percy Cerutty

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

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

Sensible men no longer belive in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants. — Alfonso X Of Castile

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

I CAN, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist's attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word "bosh!" Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow "scientific" bounds. — William James

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

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

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

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received. — Whitley Strieber

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

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

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

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

This faulty light fitting at the front door with the dangerously flickering bulb looks rather festive. Who says I don't do Christmas? — R.D. Ronald

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier
even quicker, once you have the habit
to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. — George Orwell

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

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

You don't have to call it God or Jesus. That's religious humbug to a lot of people, but you've gotta believe that nature and spiritual things surround us. That is what put us here! I thank the universe for that every day of my life. — Jack LaLanne

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

A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach. "Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug! — Charles Dickens

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

George Orwell, on how to avoid thinking when you speak:
You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. they will construct your sentences for you
even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent
and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear ...
It does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this, is that it is easy. — George Orwell

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

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 had no idea of the enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom. — Winston Churchill

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is. — Eugene Ionesco

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

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

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

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

He who neither drinks, nor smokes, nor dances, he who preaches & even occasionally practice piety, temperance and celibacy, is generally a saint, or a mahatma or more likely a humbug but he certainly won't make a leader or for that matter a good soldier — Sam Manekshaw

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 - crowd 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.
- "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts — Mark Twain

Bah," said Scrooge, "Humbug. — Charles Dickens

The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. He's not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and powerfuller. She's got flying monkeys. She's like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like Kryptonite to her. — Kelly Link

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

General literature without the humbug," was the New Yorker's original mission. — Harold Holzer

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

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

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

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

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

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

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial. — Albert Camus

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

He read me Whitman, of whom he was very fond, and also Emerson.
I didn't like Whitman, and said so. I always thought him a writer who tried to bully his way to prophecy. Of Emerson at the time I had no opinions to offer. I found him out later to be a sugary humbug. His transcendental bunkum sickened me. — Patrick Kavanagh

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

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

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

The people cannot govern themselves, they must be governed by somebody. If they will not do their duty without being half forced and half humbugged, somebody must force them and humbug them. Some energetic and capable minority must always be in power. Well, I am on the side of the energetic minority whose principles I agree with. The Revolution is as cruel as we were; but its aims are my aims. Therefore I stand for the Revolution. — Anonymous

The Great and Terrible Humbug, — L. Frank Baum

There's nothing to it," they all said in chorus, "if you have a magic staff." Then six of them cancelled themselves out and simply disappeared.
"But it's only a big pencil," the Humbug objected, tapping at it with his cane.
"True enough," agreed the Mathemagician; "but once you learn to use it, there's no end to what you can do. — Norton Juster

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

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

The League of Nations is the greatest humbug in history. They cannot even protect a little nation like Armenia. They do nothing but pass useless resolutions. — David Lloyd George

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

Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure?"
"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough. — Charles Dickens

From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence
in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug ... I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.
- from Harper's Notebook, November 2010 — Lewis H. Lapham

Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are. — Desmond Tutu

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

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

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

What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

[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

With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the 'sixties', as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance , had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone - beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty. — John Galsworthy

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

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