Shameful Quotes - Page 12

• Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

  Annie Dillard

  Giving, Ashes, Safe

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.88, Canongate Books

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• It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true-unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward-shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.

  Martin Amis

  Suicide, Thinking, Long Ago

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• To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

  Socrates

  Death, Wise, Fear

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• Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Race, Population, Doctrine

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• I think the penalties are grossly unfair. I think it's borderline shameful.

  Matt Kenseth

  Thinking, Unfair, Penalties

  "Q and A: Kenseth Calls Penalties ‘Grossly Unfair’". Racin' Today interview, www.racintoday.com. April 25, 2013.

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• People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

  Wendell Berry

  Lonely, Hate, Drug Use

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.61, Counterpoint

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• It’s a shameful moment for U.S. media when it insists on being subservient to the grotesque propaganda agencies of a violent, aggressive state.

  Noam Chomsky

  Agency, Media, Moments

  "Noam Chomsky on Media’s “Shameful Moment” in Gaza & How a U.S. Shift Could End the Occupation". "Democracy Now" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. August 11, 2014.

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