Arrogance famous quotes
05-15-2025
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AN ABSOLUTELY VITAL FILM. Exacting, enraging and revelatory. A clear, temperate and devastating account of high level arrogance and incompetence.
-- A. O. Scott -
Arrogance is despised by God because no one has the right to feel superior to another when all are equally dependent on Him for everything.
-- Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi -
No human is perfect; we all have our hidden sins. Hypocrisy is to delude yourself into denying your own sins and allow arrogance to grow within you.
-- Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi -
Superficial knowledge breeds arrogance; true knowledge induces humility.
-- Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi -
Arrogance is truly the child of impiety, but from health of soul comes happiness, dear to all, much prayed for.
-- Aeschylus -
Who are you? You don't belong to the police?' 'I am better than the police,' said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.
-- Agatha Christie -
I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
-- Alan Kay -
The essence of sin is arrogance; the essence of salvation is submission.
-- Alan Redpath -
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
-- Albert Camus -
In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.
-- Albert Camus -
To declare the Cold War over, and declare democracy has won out over totalitarianism, is a measure of arrogance and wrong-headedness.
-- Alexander Haig -
Here's what I had: I had the arrogance of saying I'd like to be in a 'good' movie, so in fact, when I was hot, I turned down a lot of stuff because I didn't think I wanted to watch it.
-- Ali MacGraw -
You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.
-- Amy Tan -
On being: Arrogance is not the prerogative of the gifted.
-- Andy Hargreaves -
If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask. -Emerson
-- Barbara Mertz -
Arrogance can be deadly.†The corners of his mouth crept up. “But you didn’t hear me say that.
-- Becca Fitzpatrick -
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
-- Benoit Mandelbrot -
Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.
-- Beryl Markham -
I want an intelligent girl whom I can talk about everything. I want her to be my friend, to be partners. I don't like when a girl is rough, but delicate and subtle. I like good manners and not rudeness nor arrogance.
-- Bill Kaulitz -
What annoys the hell out of me is the arrogance of some people. They don't even listen to our music, they decided in advance that they don't like it.
-- Billie Joe Armstrong -
There are few things more dangerous than a mixture of power, arrogance and incompetence.
-- Bob Herbert -
Arrogance is a veneer -- a thin covering of excuses hiding deep performance deficiencies.
-- Bob Lewis -
I had a great deal of arrogance and a great deal of bravado, but I think the bravado was brought on by a huge insecurity.
-- Brian Molko -
[The reason a man has] so much trouble with the Senate is that there isn't a man in the Senate who doesn't think he is better suited to be President than the President, and thinks he might have been President except for luck.
-- Calvin Coolidge -
What is wrong with us human beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever stating it in so many words, we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as if we are never going to die - an infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of immortality is what comes with it : the sense that we can engulf this inconcievable universe with our minds.
-- Carlos Castaneda -
There is a marvelous turn and trick to British arrogance; its apparent unconsciousness makes it twice as effectual.
-- Catherine Drinker Bowen -
There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him.
-- Charles Horton Cooley -
None are more unjust in their judgments of others than those who have a high opinion of themselves.
-- Charles Spurgeon -
We must not demonstrate any arrogance, and we must refrain from any irrational or undemocratic behavior.
-- Chen Shui-bian -
He inclined his head ever so slightly, displaying with his bearing the supreme confidence, even arrogance, that is the sole providence of cats, dragons, and certain highborn women.
-- Christopher Paolini -
The scientist has to take 95 per cent of his subject on trust. He has to because he can't possibly do all the experiments, therefore he has to take on trust the experiments all his colleagues and predecessors have done. Whereas a mathematician doesn't have to take anything on trust. Any theorem that's proved, he doesn't believe it, really, until he goes through the proof himself, and therefore he knows his whole subject from scratch. He's absolutely 100 per cent certain of it. And that gives him an extraordinary conviction of certainty, and an arrogance that scientists don't have.
-- Christopher Zeeman -
There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you're wrong and you can't face it; the other is when you're right and nobody else can face it.
-- Criss Jami -
The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.
-- D. A. Carson -
Enough is enough. Enough of the waste. Enough of the spending. Enough of the debt. Enough of the arrogance in Washington, D.C.
-- Dan Benishek -
What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.
-- David Duchovny -
I'm Billy the Kid, the fastest draw. It's not arrogance. It's the truth.
-- David Geffen -
Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind.
-- David Hume -
False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
-- David Mitchell -
This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.
-- Dean Koontz -
In their arrogance, ABC wanted a number-one show. They wouldnt accept losing that time slot.
-- Dirk Benedict -
A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.
-- Don Cupitt -
That outgrowth of arrogance comes at a price: some people don't like is. I take responsibility for that.
-- Donny Deutsch -
He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin -
Arrogance and fanaticism cause the hardening of positions taken and entrenchment can only lead to a dead end.
-- Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople -
It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to.
-- Edgar Friedenberg -
People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.
-- Edna Ferber -
People speak with enormous pomposity and arrogance about music.
-- Elvis Costello -
Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.
-- Emma Goldman -
Stand-up came out of three things. Frustration, necessity and arrogance. I didn't have a great career ahead of me in anything. Someone literally said to me, 'You should try stand-up,' and took me to a venue.
-- Eric Bana -
With confidence you believe you can overcome your weaknesses. With arrogance you don't even see your weaknesses.
-- Eric Mangini -
You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader, you can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it. And without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance.
-- Eric Shinseki -
Without leadership, command is a hollow experience, a vacuum often filled with mistrust and arrogance..
-- Eric Shinseki -
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.
-- Ernst Haeckel -
In addition to their 'do no evil' motto, Googlers have always been guided by another, much less explicit philosophy: 'computational arrogance.'
-- Evgeny Morozov -
His mind scolded him for his stupidity and urged him to forget her but his heart had no justifications for its stand. It remained unmoved, its solidarity unaffected, its arrogance still holding.
-- Faraaz Kazi -
On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq, [Bush's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw.
-- Fareed Zakaria -
A single word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.
-- Frances Trollope -
I've never been too afraid of what other people have said, especially when I was younger, but I suppose that was the arrogance of youth.
-- Francesca Annis -
Can you worship a God who isn't obligated to explain His actions to you? Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation?
-- Francis Chan -
Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.
-- Francis Crick -
The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.
-- Francois Mauriac -
There is nothing holy nor sacred to those who have abandoned God and reason in order to follow their perverse desires.
-- Francois Rabelais -
This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.
-- Franz Grillparzer -
Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche -
This extraordinary arrogance that change must start at the top is a way of guaranteeing that change will not happen in most companies.
-- Gary Hamel -
Arrogance is the act of the great; presumption that of the little.
-- George Crabbe -
In urging all writers to be steadfast in reliance on the ultimate victory of excellence, we should no less strenuously urge upon them to beware of the intemperate arrogance which attributes failure to a degraded condition of the public mind. The instinct which leads the world to worship success is not dangerous. The book which succeeds accomplishes its aim. The book which fails may have many excellencies, but they must have been misdirected.
-- George Henry Lewes -
I see myself capable of arrogance and brutality... That's a fierce thing, to discover within yourself that which you despise the most in others.
-- George Stevens -
The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.
-- Goldwin Smith -
We had every problems starting a big top could have. The tent fell down on the first day. We had problems getting people into the shows. It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived.
-- Guy Laliberte -
Why is it that skeptics are always being accused of arrogance? For the record, we're the guys who DON'T claim to have absolute knowledge about the origin of the universe, the origin of life, what happens when we die, what will happen in the future, etc.
-- Guy P. Harrison -
The arrogance of the young is a direct result of not having known enough consequences. The turkey that every day greedily approaches the farmer who tosses him grain is not wrong. It is just that no one ever told him about Thanksgiving.
-- Harry Golden -
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism...the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.
-- Henry Seidel Canby -
Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof [of the four-color theorem] is also defective.
-- Hermann Minkowski -
Revealed insights should leave us stricken with the knowledge of how little we really know. It should never lead to an emotional arrogance based upon a false assumption that we somehow have all the answers - that we in fact have a corner on truth. For we do not.
-- Hugh B. Brown -
The disease that knowledge brings is arrogance, and the disease that worship brings is showing off
-- Ibn Taymiyyah -
Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.
-- Ingmar Bergman -
I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity.
-- J. Allen Hynek -
I wrote a letter to Harvard, explaining that I was having difficulty deciding between it and the University of Pennsylvania. Could I come and visit? Years later, the dean of students at Harvard told me that my letter had been posted in the dean’s office for the amusement of the staff. Thus did I learn the measure of institutional arrogance.
-- J. Michael Bishop -
Arrogance is a weird emotion to take on, but you have to do it.
-- Jack Gleeson -
The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.
-- James A. Michener -
I sometimes have an over-confidence that can be viewed as arrogance.
-- James Corden -
With typical arrogance, the Anglos claimed to cherish freedom of speech but failed to recognize this right for anyone but themselves. Where did the Constitution say anything about English?
-- James Crawford -
I think it's important that the rest of the world know that we're not all the same and that we don't all have the sort of arrogance it feels like they're perceiving from our leaders.
-- James Denton -
My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.
-- James Inhofe -
someone was telling me that no more applications were being accepted for the position of God.
-- Jan Burke -
It's a deep and all but certain truth about narcissistic personalities that to meet them is to love them, but to know them well is to find them unbearable. Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.
-- Jeffrey Kluger -
Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.
-- Jeffrey Kluger -
My arrogance knows no bounds and I will make no peace today, and you should be so lucky to find a woman like me.
-- Jenny Holzer -
The arrogance of some of those who are so damned sure they are right is just astounding. Scientific witch hunts are often the worst kind, and have been since the secular authorities stopped enforcing the local bishop's decrees of anathema.
-- Jerry Pournelle -
The worst kind of arrogance is arrogance from ignorance.
-- Jim Rohn -
This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.
-- Joe Biden -
When I very first started out, I had that arrogance of youth.
-- Joely Richardson -
Arrogance is a way for a person to cover up shame. After years of arrogance, the arrogant person is so out of touch, she truly doesn't know who she is. This is one of the greatest tragedies of shame cover-ups: not only does the person hide from others, she also hides from herself.
-- John Bradshaw
