These humbug quotes will inspire you. Humbug deceptive or false talk or behavior.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging humbug quotes, humbug sayings, and humbug proverbs.
Best Humbug Quotes
- “Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it’s a piece of humbug.” ~ Max Frisch
- “Every idiot who goes about with a ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.” ~ Mark Twain
-
“Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.” ~ H. G. Wells
- “The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug himself.” ~ Carl Jung
- “Let us not foist this humbug on the world.” ~ Ryan Shawcross
- “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
-
“People don’t like the true and simple; they like fairy tales and humbug.” ~ Edmond de Goncourt
- “Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.” ~ Alfred Nobel
- “We have looked into the future and the future is ours.” ~ Cesar Chavez
- “There is only one true thing: Instantly paint what you see.” ~ Edouard Manet
-
“The voice of the people is the voice of humbug.” ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
- “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
- “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
- “Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.” ~ George Eliot
-
“Sensitive, humbug. Everybody thinks I’m sensitive. Wait until they hear my new album.” ~ Carole King
- “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
- “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
- “In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh
-
“Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things. – Humbug” ~ Norton Juster
- “If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” ~ Charles Dickens
- “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
- “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
-
“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
- “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
- “Back to Basics was absolute humbug, wasn’t it?” ~ Edwina Currie
- “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” ~ Mark Twain
-
“What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!” ~ Logan Pearsall Smith
- “Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven’t much left to do business with.” ~ Josh Billings
- “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
- “The bigger the humbug, the better people will like it.” ~ P. T. Barnum
-
“[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
- “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
- “We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” ~ Hermann Hesse
- “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
-
“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
- “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
- “Every one of the 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… 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 [called] 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
- “I’m a songwriter first…In my career I have never felt that my being a woman was an obstacle or an advantage. I guess I’ve been oblivious…Sensitive, humbug. Everybody thinks I’m sensitive…There is a downside to having one of the biggest-selling albums ever.” ~ Carole King
-
“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
- “It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
- “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
- “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
-
“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
- “Sensible men no longer believe in miracles; they were invented by priests to humbug the peasants.” ~ Alfonso X of Castile
- “I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils haricots – those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridites calling themselves human food!” ~ George Gissing
- “What will the preachers say? .. to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike.” ~ Voltaire
-
“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
- “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.” ~ George Orwell
- “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
- “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
-
“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
- “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.” ~ Walter Guido Vincenti
- “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
- “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
-
“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.” ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
- “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
- “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: he 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
- “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
-
“Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!” ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe
- “It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn’t no objections, ‘long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn’t no use to tell Jim, so I didn’t tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.” ~ Mark Twain
- “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
-
“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
- “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
- “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
