Pernicious Quotes

• The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

  Steven Pressfield

  Procrastination, Today, Habit

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.22, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• No evil can result from its [slavery's] inhibition more pernicious than its toleration.

  Martin Van Buren

  Evil, Presidential, Slavery

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• All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.

  Alexander Herzen

  Organization, Political, Atheism

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• Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Fear, Patriotic, Patriotism

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• Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Mirrors, Cheerful, Would Be

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

  Andre Gide

  Life, Success, Butterfly

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• Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.

  Allan Bloom

  Belief, Illusion, Reason

  "Closing of the American Mind".

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• I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

  Jonathan Swift

  Race, Gulliver, Earth

  Gulliver's Travels "A Voyage to Brobdingnag" ch. 6 (1726)

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• South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.

  Thabo Mbeki

  White, Criminals, Example

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• In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Peace, War, Independent

  graf Leo Tolstoy (1904). “Essays, letters, miscellanies”

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• If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.

  William S. Burroughs

  Needs, Anemia, Like You

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• A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly

  Andre Gide

  Butterfly, Know Thyself, Caterpillars

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• Half-truths can be more pernicious than outright falsehoods.

  Wendy Lesser

  Lying, Half, Falsehood

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• The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. Not a particularly pernicious part. I didn't beat up on them. Basically I don't think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work, wine with dinner and so on.

  Stephen King

  Dad, Drinking, Kids

  "Part two of the full Stephen King interview". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. September 14, 2000.

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• But the Jews are so hardened that they listen to nothing; though overcome by testimonies they yield not an inch. It is a pernicious race, oppressing all men by their usury and rapine. If they give a prince or magistrate a thousand florins, they extort twenty thousand from the subjects in payment. We must ever keep on guard against them.

  Martin Luther

  Men, Yield, Race

  Martin Luther (1848). “The Table Talk Or Familiar Discourse of Martin Luther”, p.352

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• Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.

  Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

  Ideas, Judging, Competition

  Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974)

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• I would like, with the sun shining through the window on a crisp early-autumnal mid-morning, with a sufficiency of Monster Cappucino flowing in my veins to prompt minimal sentience, to declare my view for the record that Drummer Jokes are a cruel and pernicious form of humour introduced to the world by under-humoured persons lacking in sensitivity and concern for other drummers.

  Robert Fripp

  Morning, Views, Concern For Others

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• I smoke in moderation. Only one cigar at a time.

  Mark Twain

  Smoking, Cigar, Moderation

  Mark Twain (2013). “Great Speeches by Mark Twain”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Self, Poison, Half

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• Wine is constant proof that God loves us and likes to see us happy.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Humorous, Drinking, Beer

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• I'm vile and perverted. I'm obsessed and deranged. I've existed for years but very little has changed. I'm the tool of the government and industry too. For I'm destined to rule and regulate you. You may think I'm pernicious, but you can't look away. I'll make you think I'm delicious with the stuff that I say. I'm the best you can get... have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozing out of your TV set.

  Frank Zappa

  Thinking, Government, Years

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• Disbelief in futurity loosens in a great measure the ties of morality, and may be for that reason pernicious to the peace of civil society.

  David Hume

  Ties, May, Belief

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• French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

  Camille Paglia

  Intellectual, Speak, Tradition

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Three things too much, and three too little are pernicious to man; to speak much, and know little; to spend much, and have little; to presume much, and be worth little.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Men, Three, Littles

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• We have been very effectively pacified by the pernicious ideology of a consumer society that is centered on the cult of the self - an undiluted hedonism and narcissism. That has become a very effective way to divert our attention while the country is reconfigured into a kind of neofeudalism, with a rapacious oligarchic elite and an anemic government that no longer is able to intercede on behalf of citizens but cravenly serves the interests of the oligarchy itself.

  Chris Hedges

  Country, Self, Government

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. July 14, 2011.

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