Contempt Quotes - Page 13

• Boasting and bravado may exist in the breast even of the coward, if he is successful through a mere lucky hit; but a just contempt of an enemy can alone arise in those who feel that they are superior to their opponent by the prudence of their measures.

  Thucydides

  Successful, Enemy, Coward

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• Servility is disgusting to a truly noble character, and engenders only contempt.

  Hosea Ballou

  Character, Noble, Disgusting

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• We sometimes condemn the present, by praising the past; and show our contempt of what is now, by our esteem for what is no more.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Past, Sometimes, Praise

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• The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.

  Kenyon Cox

  Art, Self, Discipline

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• Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm — hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.

  Sarah Vowell

  Country, War, Mean

  "Assassination Vacation". Book by Sarah Vowell, www.npr.org. March 2005.

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• I can't bear to hear a human being spoken of with contempt just because of his group identification...It's these respectable people here who create those hooligans out there.

  Isaac Asimov

  People, Bears, Groups

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• the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death; and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.

  Umberto Eco

  Beautiful, Hate, Destiny

  Umberto Eco (2006). “The Island of the Day Before”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

  James Lee Burke

  Hurt, Children, Parent

  James Lee Burke (2011). “Heartwood”, p.370, Island Books

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• All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Fate, Political, Politics

  Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue (2008). “Collected stories and other writings”

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• How many we know who have fled the sweetness of a tranquil life in their homes, among the friends, to seek the horror of uninhabitable deserts; who have flung themselves into humiliation, degradation, and the contempt of the world, and have enjoyed these and even sought them out.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Home, Desert, Degradation

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.42, Stanford University Press

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• The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.

  George Eliot

  Blow, Giving, Negativity

  George Eliot (1866). “Felix Holt: The Radical”, p.31

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• Politics resemble religion; attempting to divest either of ceremony is the most certain mode of bringing either into contempt.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Politics, Certain, Attempting

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• Its contempt for citizens ... is so routine, and so unlimited, that the agency has become a kind of Frankenstein, running wild and terrorizing Americans at will. The IRS hypocritically requires mistake-free returns when its own books are in shambles. It demands exorbitant sums of money without regard to the accuracy of its claims. It doesn't hesitate to use every possible maneuver to get what it wants, sometimes destroying businesses -- and lives -- in the process.

  James Bovard

  Running, Mistake, Book

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• In one period the grossest ignorance and barbarism prevailed in the world; and afterwards, in a more enlightened age, the most daring infidelity, and contempt of God; so that the world which was once over-run with ignorance, now by wisdom knew not God, but changed the glory of the incorruptible God as much as in the most barbarous ages, into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Nay, as they increased in science and politeness, they ran into more abundant and extravagant idolatries.

  William Carey

  Running, Ignorance, Men

  "An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians". Book by William Carey, 1792.

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• When birth control pills were available in Europe but not in the United States, American women created an uproar about how the unwillingness to make the pill available showed a contempt for the lives of women. When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released birth control pills with high dosages of hormones that were later found to be unnecessarily high, they were attacked for not caring about women enough to do the necessary tests.

  Warren Farrell

  Caring, Europe, Fda

  "The Myth of Male Power". Book by Warren Farrell, 1993.

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• Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

  Lorrie Moore

  Girlfriend, Writing, School

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• There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

  James A. Baldwin

  People, Heaven, Hatred

  "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem". Essay by James A. Baldwin (1960), as quoted in "The Fire This Time" by David Remnick, www.newyorker.com. January 12, 2015.

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• For they imagined as they wished--that it was a wild shot,/ an unintended killing--fools, not to comprehend/ they were already in the grip of death./ But glaring under his brows Odysseus answered: 'You yellow dogs, you thought I'd never make it/ home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,/ twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared/ bid for my wife while I was still alive./ Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,/ contempt for what men say of you hereafter./ Your last hour has come. You die in blood.

  Homer

  Dog, Home, Men

  Homer, Robert Fitzgerald (1961). “The Odyssey”, Anchor Books

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• JUDGE: Are you trying to show contempt for this court? MAE WEST: I was doin' my best to hide it.

  Mae West

  Judging, Trying, West

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• When the Soviet Union came to be run by a valetudinarian mafioso like Brezhnev, the thing itself had fallen into self-contempt.

  Leonid Brezhnev

  Running, Self, Unions

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• For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Love Is, Men, Interesting

  W. Somerset Maugham (1919). “The Moon and Sixpence”

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• He ["the male"] is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than apes, because he is, first of all, capable of a large array of negative feelings that the apes aren't - hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, disgrace, doubt - and, secondly, he is aware of what he is and isn't.

  Valerie Solanas

  Hate, Twilight, Feelings

  "SCUM Manifesto". Book by Valerie Solanas, p. 1, 1967.

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• Contempt mates well with pity.

  Gloria Naylor

  Disrespect, Pity, Mates

  Gloria Naylor (2017). “Linden Hills: A Novel”, p.26, Open Road Media

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• and standing before me a bloodied bottle of Absolut in her hand, is Mrs. Allington, her pink jogging suit drenched, her chest heaving, her eyes filled with contempt as she stared down at Rachel's prone body. Mrs. Allington shakes her head. "I'm a size twelve," she says.

  Meg Cabot

  Eye, Hands, Twelve

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• The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author . . .

  Daniel Handler

  Book, Sadness, Thinking

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