Susceptibility Quotes

“It is a troublesome thing, Halford, this susceptibility to affronts where none are intended.”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“We don't do well with infinity and endless possibility, and so we break things down into individual units and into stories. And then we accidentally believe in those stories, and we accidentally start acting them out. Stories about what love is, what happiness is. What men are, what women are. Unable to shape our own stories about the madness that surrounds us, we get infected with other people's stories, trying to ignore the discomfort that comes with an imperfect fit.”
― Jessa Crispin, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

“This susceptibility to impressions had been his undoing, no doubt. Still at his age he had, like a boy or a girl even, these alternations of mood; good days, bad days, for no reason whatever, happiness from a pretty face, downright misery at the sight of a frump.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“A man who lacks understanding is susceptible to deception”
― Sunday Adelaja

“Given that fascism tends to take hold in a step-by-step manner rather than by making one giant leap, could it ever proceed very far in America before being stopped? Is the United States immune to this malady—or susceptible?”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“By shielding people against the dangers of examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society. What people then get used to is not so much the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, as the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars. If somebody appears who, for whatever purposes, wishes to abolish the old values or virtues, he will find that easy enough provided he offers a new code and he will need relatively little force and no persuasion—that is proof that the new values are better than the old—to impose it. The more firmly men hold to the old code, the more eager will they be to assimilate themselves to the new one. Which means that, in practice, the readiest to obey will be those who were the most respectable pillars of society.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind