Vacuous Quotes

• Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

  Cyril Connolly

  Dream, Selfish, Night

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

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• Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Gossip, Television, Vacuity

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• Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.

  Noam Chomsky

  Simple, Issues, Effort

  Noam Chomsky (2004). “Language and Politics”, p.345, AK Press

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• Maybe our young people are not as vacuous as we would like to lead ourselves to believe - that all they're interested in is hairdos and looking at other beautiful people. Maybe they're interested in learning something.

  David James Elliott

  Beautiful, Believe, People

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

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• The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Giving Up, Ideas, Soul

  "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" by Richard B. Woodward, archive.nytimes.com. April 19, 1992.

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• The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.

  Michael Shermer

  Liberty, Speech, Libertarian

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• Again and again parents describe...the trancelike nature of their children's television watching. The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth. The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look.

  Marie Winn

  Children, Eye, Television Watching

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• It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?

  Richard Dawkins

  Christian, Ignorance, Astrology

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• You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

  Damian Lewis

  Jobs, Writing, Film

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• It's one thing for a person to live his life as a vacuous shell without fully comprehending the extent of his transgressions, but I was guilty of the greater sin; I knew what was right, and I chose to reject it.

  Tarek Saab

  Shells, Sin, Guilty

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• Such a divine profession is art! When everything else looks so stale and disgustingly vacuous, so enthralls even the littlest real effort of art our innermost and carries us from town, from country, from earth, as that it must be truely a blessing of the Gods.

  Felix Mendelssohn

  Country, Art, Real

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• There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

  Anton Chekhov

  Vapid, Mediocrity, Useless

  "Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends: With Biographical Sketch". Book by Anton Chekhov, 1920.

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• Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.

  Roger Scruton

  Firsts, Sometimes, Boring

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• Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom.

  Cyril Connolly

  Selfish, Boredom, Bitterness

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

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• Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.

  Guido von List

  Life, Religious, Nature

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• In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

  David F. Wells

  Character, Personality, Tvs

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• Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head.

  Peter Ustinov

  Beautiful, Eyelashes, Vacuums

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• The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world--in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.

  David F. Wells

  Thinking, Erosion, Self

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• Speaking of [Colin] Kaepernick, did you see what [Barack] Obama said about Kaepernick? I mean this was the biggest dodge I have ever seen. This may have been the most vacuous or empty statement on anything, because Obama clearly wanted to agree with Kaepernick but couldn't.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Mean, May, Kaepernick

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• "The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Self, People

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• If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Space, Want, Materialism

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health.

  Rodney A. Smolla

  Political, Junk, News

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• One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films.

  Woody Allen

  Profound, Intellectual, Film

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• Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

  Thomas Szasz

  Confused, Men, Race

  "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz and Karl Kraus (p. 67), March 1, 1990.

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• When griefs are genuine, I find, there is nothing more vacuous, more burdensome, or even more impertinent, than letters of consolation.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Sympathy, Grief, Letters

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