Mistrust Quotes

1. "If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed"
Author: Alan Watts

2. "It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

3. "Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me.- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp"
Author: Albert Einstein

4. "I am unacquainted with His designs, but I shall not cease to believe in them because I cannot fathom them, and I had rather mistrust my own capacity than His justice"
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

5. "I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

6. "Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty toward each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna's brush...Most women had one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so."
Author: Betty Smith

7. "Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good."
Author: Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

8. "Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness. Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea. Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out."
Author: Charlie Brooker

9. "He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

10. "I mistrust the judgment of every man in a case in which his own wishes are concerned."
Author: Daniel Webster

11. "Change comes with both fear and some pain. Those two ingredients create mistrust, misunderstanding and misinformation. Such is the process of democracy."
Author: David Mixner

12. "Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it."
Author: David Wong

13. "I always think instinct is more interesting than anything you can think up. I mistrust and am rather bored with actors who are of the Stanislavski school who think about detail."
Author: Denholm Elliott

14. "But Psyche uplifting her finger said: Sadly this star I mistrust"
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

15. "I am a doctor. A.B.... M.A.... PH.D....ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.I'm really very mistrustful."
Author: Edward Albee

16. "So foes persue, and cold alliesmistrust me, every one:let me be false in others' eyesif faithful in my own"
Author: Emily Brontë

17. "I mistrust anyone... if they're saying, 'Well, that market wants this,' and you're not part of that market."
Author: Evan Williams

18. "Suppositions in friendship is mistrusting...."
Author: Fawad

19. "But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

20. "Digressions, objections, delight in mockery, carefree mistrust are signs of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

21. "Fierce and solitary he awaited death, mistrustful and hostile to all"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

22. "She poked him in the center of his chest with two fingers to punctuate her words. "You are an unfeeling"—poke —"traitorous"—poke—"mistrusting"—poke—"rude"—poke —"booby!" Every poke turned him mortal, but Lord Maccon didn't seem to mind it in the least. Instead he grabbed the hand that poked him and brought it to his lips. "You put it very well, my love."
Author: Gail Carriger

23. "Indeed, in the present climate of mistrust of institutions, many people who yearn for a more meaningful and fulfilling life would regard the church as an unlikely place to go for guidance."
Author: Hugh Mackay

24. "The increasing mistrust between the Arab-Muslim peoples and the western world is rooted in the conflict in Palestine."
Author: Ismail Haniyeh

25. "You destruct the attention the world gives you when you mistrust your own ability"
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

26. "?Pleasure is wild and sweet. She likes purple flowers. She loves the sun and the wind and the night sky. She carries a silver bowl full of liquid moonlight. She has a cat named Midnight with stars on his paws. Many people mistrust Pleasure, and even more misunderstand her. For a long time I could barely stand to be in ...the same room with her..."
Author: J. Ruth Gendler

27. "You think I'm a fool?" demanded Harry."No, I think you're like James," said Lupin, "who would have regarded it as the height of dishonor to mistrust his friends."
Author: J.K. Rowling

28. "...You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump."
Author: Janet Fitch

29. "Mistrust all those in whom the desire to punish is imperative - Goethe"
Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

30. "...maybe I am just your priest - or a churl - perhaps you mistrust me the way the medievals mistrusted monks..."
Author: John Geddes

31. "...You say you don't mistrust me, yet you quote Chrysostom - Hell is paved with priests' skulls...."
Author: John Geddes

32. "In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn't telling."
Author: Kat Rosenfield

33. "The old oak, utterly transformed, draped in a tent of sappy dark green, basked faintly, undulating in the rays of the evening sun. Of the knotted fingers, the gnarled excrecenses, the aged grief and mistrust- nothing was to be seen. Through the rough, century-old bark, where there were no twigs, leaves had burst out so sappy, so young, that is was hard to believe that the aged creature had borne them. "Yes, that is the same tree," thought Prince Andrey, and all at once there came upon him an irrational, spring feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life rose to his memory at once. Austerlitz, with that lofty sky, and the dead, reproachful face of his wife, and Pierre on the ferry, and the girl, thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night and that moon- it all rushed at once into his mind."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

34. "Are you always so mistrusting?" he said, lifting a brow."When my escort is a demon, yes."
Author: Lia Davis

35. "Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals."
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa

36. "He who believes God, recognizes Him as true and faithful, and himself as a liar; for he mistrusts his own thinking as false, and trusts the Word of God as being true, though it absolutely contradicts his own reasoning."
Author: Martin Luther

37. "Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped.In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect."
Author: Naomi Wolf

38. "But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind."
Author: Paul Valéry

39. "No questions, no excuses, none of this who-am-I, what-am-I, where-am-I crap, not a grain of self-mistrust or the slightest impulse toward spiritual distinction; rather, like so many of his generation out of Newark's old Jewish slums, a man who breathed the spirit of opposition while remaining completely in accord with the ways and means of the earth. Back when"
Author: Philip Roth

40. "In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted."
Author: Rex Stout

41. "Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith....Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith."
Author: Saul D. Alinsky

42. "But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears."
Author: Sofia Samatar

43. "And there it was. The prim face of censure he'd been seeking. A strange sense of satisfaction descended on him. Divine justice, perhaps. Other men, better men, confessed their sins to priests and saints, but Gray had chosen for his confessor this governess. The most beautiful woman he'd ever set eyes on, in all his years of chasing pleasure from one horizon to the next. The only woman to stir this desperate yearning in his breast. And this was his penance-to watch her shrink back into her chair, to see those clear eyes glaze with mistrust as she at last recognized him for the devil he was.Yes, this was his due. And she wasn't finished yet, his petite, austere inquisitor."
Author: Tessa Dare

44. "From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in."
Author: Thomas Hobbes

45. "Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. "Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!" we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we've merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

46. "The crowd mistrusts the allurement of paladins. The masses, ponderous bodies that they are, and fragile on account of their very heaviness, fear adventure; and there is adventure in the ideal."
Author: Victor Hugo

47. "If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.(pg.89, "Think Little")"
Author: Wendell Berry

48. "As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn't hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the cafe at couple after couple, eaching confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn't down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there... It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony."
Author: Will Self

49. "I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest."
Author: Will Self

50. "Well, I think the Yoruba gods are truthful. Truthful in the sense that i consider religion and the construct of deities simply an extension of human qualities taken, if you like, to the nth degree. i mistrust gods who become so separated from humanity that enormous crimes can be committed in their names. i prefer gods who can be brought down to earth and judged, if you like."
Author: Wole Soyinka

Mistrust Quotes Pictures