Sinister Quotes - Page 5

• I am constantly trying to reflect the way women are treated. It's hard to interpret that in clothes or in a show but there's always an underlying, sinister side to women's sexuality in my work because of the way I have seen women treated in my life. Where I come from, a woman met a man, had babies, moved to Dagenham, two up two down, made the dinner, went to bed. That was my image of women and I didn't want that. I wanted to get that out of my head.

  Alexander McQueen

  Baby, Men, Two

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• I like using odd materials or odd components for embroideries. I've always liked that Elsa Schiaparelli world of playing with unusual objects to make something really beautiful. That's part of the game. We can do things that are lighthearted and playful but we also do things that are quite dark and sinister. I oscillate between the two.

  Giles Deacon

  Beautiful, Dark, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• ...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

  Thomas Hardy

  Clouds, Brightness, Contingency

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman”, p.257, Thomas Hardy

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• Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.

  Bertrand Russell

  Use, World, Moral

  Bertrand Russell (1960). “Sceptical Essays”

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• It's usually easier to rouse stupidity to action than to arouse wisdom to effort, for wisdom sees alternatives while stupidity lacks the imagination to do this. All sinister interests in a country can depend ultimately upon the strength of stupidity.

  Chapman Cohen

  Country, Imagination, Effort

  Chapman Cohen (1900). “Opinions, Random Reflections, and Wayside Sayings”

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• Bolshevism turns flourishing countryside into sinister wastes of ruins; National Socialism transforms a Reich of destruction and misery into a healthy state with a flourishing economic life.

  Adolf Hitler

  Healthy, Waste, Ruins

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We, perhaps, have corrupted our children and our grandchildren by heedless affluence, by a lack of manliness, by giving the younger generation more money and liberty than their youth can handle, by indoctrinating them with sinister ideologies and false values, by permitting them, as young children, to indulge themselves in imprudence to superiors and defiance of duly constituted authority, by lack of prudent, swift punishment when the transgressed, by coddling and pampering them when they were children and protecting them from a very dangerous world.

  Taylor Caldwell

  Children, Parenting, Dangerous World

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Most bad," the host concluded. "If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.

  Mikhail Bulgakov

  Wine, Men, Games

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• I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell on earth to be there [in the presence of the entities], and yet I couldn't move, couldn't cry out, couldn't get away. I'd lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be. And they were here and I couldn't get away.

  Whitley Strieber

  Moving, Dark, Agony

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• Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

  Patrick Cockburn

  War, Thinking, Giving

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• In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

  Karl Marx

  Revenge, Class, Sight

  Karl Marx, Frederick Engels (2005). “The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document”, p.36, Haymarket Books

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• At my age, and in my circumstances, what sinister object, or personal emolument had I to seek after, in this life? The growing infirmities of age and the increasing love of retirement, daily confirm my decided predilection for domestic life: and the great Searcher of human hearts is my witness, that I have no wish, which aspires beyond the humble and happy lot of living and dying a private citizen on my own farm.

  George Washington

  Retirement, Heart, Humble

  George Washington (1835). “The writings of George Washington: being his correspondence, addresses, messages, and other papers, official and private, selected and published from the original manuscripts; with a life of the author, notes, and illustrations”, p.412

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• There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.

  William S. Burroughs

  Photography, Desire, Facts

  William S. Burroughs (2007). “Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader”, p.87, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

  Victor Hugo

  Philosophy, Past, Men

  Victor Hugo (1905). “Works: Les misérables; Fantine. Cosette. Marius. Saint-Denis. Jean Valjean”

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• The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century-sex and paranoia.

  J. G. Ballard

  Dream, Sex, Moving

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• Uh-huh. You know with that sinister tone you should look into working for the IRS. I’m sure they’re desperate for people who can cow others with a single growl. (Susan)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  People, Looks, Irs

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2007). “Dark Side of the Moon”, p.72, Macmillan

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• In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.

  H. L. Mencken

  Kings, Political, Quality

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• It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Humor, Men, Creating

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.3839, Delphi Classics

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• To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Running, Exercise, Risk

  "American right vows to settle score as Bush's nemesis turns up the heat" by Lawrence Donegan, Paul Harris, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2004.

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• Behind us lay the great Antarctic Land; snow peaks rising beyond one another until by distance they dwindled away into insignificancy. The silence and immobility of the scene was impressive; not the slightest animation or vitality anywhere. It was like a mental image of our globe in its primitive state - a spectacle of Chaos. Around is ice and snow and the remnants of internal fires; above, a sinister sky; below the sombre sea; and over all, the silence of the sepulchre!

  Louis Bernacchi

  Distance, Fire, Ice

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• Something sinister in the tone Told me my secret must be known: Word I was in the house alone Somehow must have gotten abroad, Word I was in my life alone, Word I had no one left but God.

  Robert Frost

  House, Secret, Tone

  Robert Frost (1975). “The poetry of Robert Frost”

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• Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad.

  Jack Kerouac

  Country, Crazy, Eye

  Jack Kerouac (1957). “On the Road”, Viking Press

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• I feel a thread tugging me again, but this time I know that it isn’t some sinister force dragging me toward death. This time I know it’s my mother's hand, drawing me into her arms. And I go gladly into her embrace.

  Veronica Roth

  Mother, Hands, Drawing

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• The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Men, Primitive Man

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

  Philip Roth

  Art, Grief, Writing

  Philip Roth (1998). “I Married a Communist”, p.230, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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