Distrust

Distrust is an active lack of trust in someone or something, leading to wariness of the subject.

Quotes

• When you have overcome one temptation, you must be ready to enter the lists with another. As distrust, in some sense, is the mother of safety, so security is the gate of danger. A man had need to fear this most of all, that he fears not at all.
  • Thomas Brooks, p. 532. reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• Distrust is an acquired feeling — we never doubt till we have been deceived ...
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Francesca Carrara (1834), Vol III. Chapter 3

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 197.

• Usurpator diffida
  Di tutti sempre.
  • A usurper always distrusts the whole world.
  • Vittorio Alfieri, Polinice, III. 2.

• What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
  • George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book V, Chapter XLIV.

• When desperate ills demand a speedy cure,
  Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly.
  • Samuel Johnson, Irene, Act IV, scene 1, line 87.

• A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity nor conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
  • Madame Necker.

• Three things a wise man will not trust,
  The wind, the sunshine of an April day,
  And woman's plighted faith.
  • Robert Southey, Madoc in Azthan, Part XXIII, line 51.