Detest Quotes - Page 6

• Genius, when employed in works whose tendency it is to demoralize and to degrade us, should be contemplated with abhorrence rather than with admiration; such a monument of its power, may indeed be stamped with immortality, but like the Coliseum at Rome, we deplore its magnificence because we detest the purposes for which it was designed.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Rome, Purpose, Genius

  Charles Caleb Colton (1821). “Lacon: or, Many things in few words”, p.239

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• I paint to understand my world and my place in it. I paint to pray, to curse, to sort, to number, to structure, to destructure, to bleed, to preserve, to recognize, to see, to hide, to show, to tell, to think, to stop thinking, to detest, to love, to act, to be still, to laugh, to cry, to detest, but mostly to love for now I am human, but in a few short years I will be something else.

  Janice Tanton

  Thinking, Years, Numbers

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• All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Hate, Science, Men

  Frankenstein ch. 10 (1818)

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• I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Self, Taught, Regard

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• I have never heard enough classical music to be able to enjoy it; & the simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but will all my heart. To me an opera is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable. I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Hate, Humorous

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• I do not comprehend those rules of conduct that make us so content with self and so cold to those we love. I detest prudence, I even hate (suffer me to say so) those duties of friendship which substitute propriety for interest, and circumspection for feeling. How shall I say it? I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

  Jeanne Julie Eleonore de Lespinasse

  Hate, Self, Feelings

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• Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.

  Orson Scott Card

  Grief, People, Groups

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• Love the offender, yet detest the offense.

  Alexander Pope

  Sin, Offense, Offence

  Alexander Pope (1848). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope: To which is Prefixed a Life of the Author”, p.136

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• If there is anybody I detest, it is weak-minded sentimentalists-all those melancholy people who, out of an excess of sympathy for others, miss the thrill of their own essence and drift through life without identity, like a human fog, feeling sorry for everyone.

  John Cheever

  Sorry, Fog, Essence

  John Cheever, Blake Bailey (2009). “John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings”

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• I detest professional anythings but particularly professional writers. Most of them today are just garbage collectors.

  Cleveland Amory

  Writing, Today, Garbage

  Cleveland Amory (1980). “The trouble with nowadays: a curmudgeon strikes back”, G K Hall & Co

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• One may detest the wickedness of a brother without hating him.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Brother, Hate, Wickedness

  Mahatma Gandhi, Anand T. Hingorani, Ganga Anand Hingorani (1985). “The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts”

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• The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Humanity, Brothers Karamazov

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2017). “The Brothers Karamazov (English Russian Edition illustrated): Братья Карамазовы (англо-русская редакция иллюстрированная)”, p.128, Clap Publishing, LLC.

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• I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I'm a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.

  Primo Levi

  Memories, Men, Clothes

  "The Mirror Maker" by Primo Levi, ("The Premise"), 1986.

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• A man who doesn't detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Men, Joy, Fool

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2000). “The Left Hand of Darkness”, p.146, Penguin

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• Our role as artist is more controversial now because there are those, claiming the absolute authority of religion, who detest much of our work as much as they detest most of our politics. Instead of rationally debating subjects like abortion or gay rights, they condemn as immoral those who favor choice and tolerance. They disown their own dark side and magnify everyone else's until, at the extreme, doctors are murdered in the name of protecting life. I wonder, who is this God they invoke, who is so petty and mean? Is God really against gun control and food stamps for poor children?

  Barbra Streisand

  Children, Mean, Dark

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• You can't be selective about freedom of speech. If you say you believe in freedom of speech you have to acknowledge the people whose views you disagree with, people whose views you may detest, nevertheless have the right to freedom of speech.

  George Brandis

  Believe, Views, People

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Acting, Actors, Drudgery

  Tallulah Bankhead (1952). “Tallulah: My Autobiography”, p.4, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• All transitory titles I detest; a virtuous life I mean to boast alone. Our birth's our sires'; our virtues be our own.

  Michael Drayton

  Mean, Titles, Birth

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• The English and Americans dislike only some Irish--the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers--the ones that think.

  Brendan Behan

  Thinking, Irish Writers, Dislike

  Brendan Behan (2014). “Behan Complete Plays”, p.280, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Names, Ideas, People

  Miguel de Unamuno (2015). “Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, Volume 3: Our Lord Don Quixote”, p.16, Princeton University Press

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• Sunnybrook Farm is now a parking lot; the petticoats are in the garbage can, where they belong in the modern world; and I detest censorship.

  Shirley Temple

  Garbage Cans, World, Censorship

  "Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women". Book by Bill Adler, February 23, 2001.

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• I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Giving, Feelings

  "For the Defense Written for the Associated Press, for use in my obituary" by H. L. Mencken, November 20, 1940.

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• But, actually, it is only Americans who say that our freedoms and prosperity are the reason foreigners hate us. If you ask the foreigners, they make it clear that it's America's bullying foreign policy they detest.

  Harry Browne

  Bullying, Hate, America

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• I am not going to say you are right because I could not take it if you smirked." "I do not smirk," Vikirnoff claimed. "Yes, you do. And I detest that after all these centuries, you are making sense. Frankly, its scary." "It is only that you are not making sense sunce you acquired a lifemate. I hope that does not happen to all men. It would be a shame." "Your sense of humor is not improving," Nicolae pointed out dryly. "I do not have a sense of humor." Vikirnoff answered. "I had not noticed," Nicolae teased.

  Christine Feehan

  Men, Scary, Doe

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• No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Laughing, Lament

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