Naive Quotes
More Naive Quotes
"People will be truly critical if they live in the plenitude of the praxis, that is, if their action encompasses a critical reflection which increasingly organizes their thinking and thus leads them to move from a purely naive knowledge of reality to a higher level, one which enables them to perceive the causes of reality."
paulo freire— Chapter 4 (Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970))
The Lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made ‘em both a little bit naive.
— Yip Harburg, “The Begat,” Finian’s Rainbow (1947)
Maybe I was naive, but I thought the whole point of being an MP was to scrutinise legislation and improve it.
sarah wollaston— Quoted in The Economist, 6th April 2013, p.36
There was a barber and his wife, / and she was beautiful. / A foolish barber and his wife. / She was his reason and his life, / and she was beautiful, / and she was virtuous. / And he was... / naive...
— Who: Sweeney Todd
— Source: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
— Note: Character sings this song, a reprise of one of the musical's very first songs, as he is holding the body of his wife, who he unknowingly killed because he did not know that she was still alive. He is killed by having his throat slashed with his own razor by Tobias Ragg shortly afterward.
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before youa tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streakof yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact colour and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.
Claude Monet— Attributed, in reminiscences written in1927 by the young American artist Lilla Cabot Perry.
As an embittered cynic, I should be programmed to vomit all over the screen at the mere sight of this, but instead, I find it strangely moving. You see, as I stare into their happy smiling faces filled with naive joie de vivre, I know they're just blissfully unaware of the crushing despair that awaits them as they venture into adulthood. The myriad disappointments, the yawning chasms of pain, the slow gnawing descent into physical decay, the sheer unrelenting horror of it all.
charlie brooker— Screenwipe S3E4
— Discussing the High School Musical series
His skill in acting a part, his cunning, his imagination, the ease with which he affected naive stupidity and then emerged into the most subtle reasoning disarmed the security agents who interrogated him.
wilhelm canaris— Fabian von Schlabrendorff
As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king’s firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict.
j. m. coetzee— p. 14 (Diary of a Bad Year (2007))
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave, when they think that their children are naive.
ogden nash— "Baby, What Makes the Sky Blue?"
I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.
grace slick— As quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1987) edited by Robert Andrews
I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix.)
kenneth thompson— "Ken Thompson clarifies matters", Linux Today. May 7, 1999. [7]
I had the naive, simplistic idea that producers and writers and artists of the time helped in a minuscule way to change the mind-set of America.
m. ward— On his album Post-War and the postwar music of the late 1940s and 50s, as quoted in Vanity Fair (August 2006)
You are very familiar with Western ways, but you are too young. You go everywhere to follow the big news, but the questions you ask are too simple -- sometimes naive.
jiang zemin— Leader of China Angrily Chastises Hong Kong Media
The Lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made ‘em both a little bit naive.
yip harburg— “The Begat” in Finian’s Rainbow (1946)
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.
friedrich hayek— The Fatal Conceit : The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76
naive you are if you believe life favours those who aren't naive.
piet hein— Naive — (Grooks)
Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder. Yet in essence, that is what you have asked our loved ones to do, through an ill-contrived and totally naive campaign against the Second Amendment.
Charlton Heston— Speech to the National Press Club (14 September 1997)
After Mitt Romney said it would be naive to go into Pakistan to pursue the terrorists, it took President Obama, against the advice of many, to give that order and finally rid this earth of Osama bin Laden. Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago!
john kerry— September 6, 2012 John Kerry’s speech to the Democratic National Convention, 2012
She was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.
ursula k. le guin— Ch. 4, §3 (p. 109)
Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain biological fallacies which may, in a sense, be held responsible for the extent and duration of the present conflict. These fallacies, which were the foundation of pacifism and other pernicious forms of social and political radicalism, dealt with the capacity of man to evolve mentally beyond his former state of subservience to primate instinct and pugnacity, and to conduct his affairs and international or interracial relations on a basis of reason and good-will. That belief in such capability is unscientific and childishly naive, is beside the question.
h. p. lovecraft— At the Root (1918)
“‘naive’ is not a word I associate with the Southern Rule. Superstitious, perhaps, traditional, yes, maddeningly set in their way, certainly but not naive.” “I meant you are naive. They must have a hidden motive.” “This is why I have no politics,” said Darvin. “I can’t think in those terms.”
ken macleod— Chapter 14 “The Extraordinary and Remarkable Ship” (p. 237)
Science seems to be at war with itself.... naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.
bertrand russell— An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), Introduction, p. 15.
In academia, ...an art historian, on being stirred to tears by the tenderness and serenity he detects in a work by a fourteenth-century Florentine painter, may end up writing a monograph, as irreproachable as it is bloodless, on the history of paint manufacture in the age of Giotto. It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.
Alain de Botton— The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009, pp. 27-29)
The Lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made ‘em both a little bit naive.
— Yip Harburg, “The Begat,” Finian’s Rainbow (1947)
With me, what you see is what you get. Yes, call me naive, but I love life. I am happy for that, I make no apologies. I do like to see the best in people, and when someone is nice to my face, I tend to believe them.
Joyce giraud— Interview with Joyce Giraud featured on Bravo TV's website, regarding The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.
— Grace Slick, as quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations (1987) edited by Robert Andrews
The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.
— Greg Palast, "Robert Mundell, evil genius of the euro", The Guardian, 26 June 2012
— "The Euro is a Big Success - No Kidding", gregpalast.com
naive fool. My death will make little difference in the long run. For now, the scourging of this land... begins.
— Who: Kel'thuzad
— Source: Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
— Note: Kel'thuzad did not remain dead, but was rather reincarnated later as a Lich, thus gaining immortality.
Über naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung.
Friedrich Schiller— Friedrich Schiller, Schiller's Poems? (1905), p. 200
