Then let Ausonia, skilled in every art To soften manners, but corrupt the heart, Pour her exotic follies o'er the town, To sanctionVice, and hunt Decorum down.

-Rochdale
  Engish Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l.618^21.

Why should the follies of this dull age Draw from thy pen such an immodest rage As seems to blast thy else-immortal bays, When thine own tongue proclaims thy itch of praise? Such thirst will argue drought.

-Carew,Thomas
  'To Ben  Jonson, Upon occasion of his Ode of Defiance annexed to his play of  The New Inn'.

   It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

-Congreve,William
  The Double Dealer, epistle dedicatory.

In the later nineteenth century, the tops of skyscrapers often took the shape of domes, surmounted by jaunty gilded lanterns; later came ziggurats, mausoleums, Alexandrian lighthouses, miniature Parthenons. These charming follies contained neither royal corpses nor effigies of gods and goddesses; rather they contained large wooden tanks filled with water.

-Gill, Brendan
  Quoted in Laura Rosen Top of the City: NewYork's hidden rooftop world (1990), foreword.

The atrocious crime of being a young man, which [Walpole] has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their youth, and not of those who continue ignorant in spite of their age and experience.

-Pitt,William, 1st Earl of Chatham known as  the Elder
  Speech to the House of Commons, 6 Mar.

Nous sommes tous oblige¤  s, pour rendre la re¤  alite¤ supportable, d'entretenir en nous quelques petites folies. We must all indulge in a few follies if we are to make reality bearable.

-Proust, Marcel
  A la recherche du temps perdu,'A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs'.

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

-Rowland, Helen
  A Guide to Men.

We cannot bring ourselves to believe it possible that a foreigner should in any respect be wiser than ourselves. If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

-Trollope, Anthony
  Stavely. Orley Farm, ch.18.