Famous quotes containing the word understand:
“I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb’s admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist’s.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I can grouse about the food, and the C.O. and anything I blame please. And that’s more than you with your Gestapo and your storm troopers and your Aryan bourgeois. Ahhh, nuts. What’s the good of talking to you. You can’t even begin to understand democracy. We own the right to be fed up with anything we damn please and say so out loud when we feel like it.”
—Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988)