Contempt Quotes - Page 12

• It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Eye, Self, Soul

  "Strivings of the Negro People" (1897)

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• To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.

  Honore de Balzac

  Money, Gold, Add

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• In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

  Quentin Crisp

  Expanding Universe, Addresses, Sides

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• The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.

  Mitch Daniels

  Enemy, Social, Arithmetic

  "Transcript: Daniels gives GOP response to State of the Union". www.cnn.com. January 24, 2012.

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• A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Thinking, People, Opponents

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• The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

  Tony Judt

  Hurt, Writing, Men

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• Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Teacher, Teaching, Years

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• One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

  Toni Morrison

  Brother, Kids, Hatred

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• Today, 'fat' has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.

  Susie Orbach

  Criticism, Today, Size

  "Fat is a prejudice issue" by Susie Orbach, www.theguardian.com. May 3, 2012.

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• It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Betrayal, Mistake, Self

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• When you're working on a creative thing, everyone has an idea, and they're pushing it. The first time you work with anybody, you have to get comfortable with the way another person pushes hard for what they want. Familiarity breeds contempt, people say. But I've found, for creative things, familiarity breeds peace of mind, because you realize you know someone better. You trust each other. You know not to take things a certain way, or a wrong way. You get to where you don't have to waste quite so much time with diplomacy. Things are a little more efficient.

  Edward Norton

  People, Creative, Mind

  Source: film.avclub.com

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• There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity -- like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.

  Molly Ivins

  Powerful, Two, People

  "The Mouth of Texas", People Weekly, December 9, 1991.

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• It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.

  Gregory Maguire

  Loneliness, Bereavement, Bitter

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• I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.

  Barack Obama

  Art, Men, Self

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.86, Canongate Books

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• That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt, and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it – the total passion for the total height – you’re incapable of anything less.

  Ayn Rand

  Love, Life, Sympathy

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.572, Penguin

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• Consider, I pray, whether you are not renouncing all shame and sincerity to advance such principles. Because a comet appears in a group of stars which the ancients thought fit to call the Virgin, therefore, shall our women be barren, or have frequent miscarriages, or die old maids. I know of nothing which hangs so ill together! To offer such things in seriousness, shows the greatest contempt of mankind, and the most scandalous lying impunity.

  Pierre Bayle

  Stars, Lying, Miscarriage

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• When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant's neck.

  Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

  Men, Tyrants, Feet

  Speech fragment, 1794.

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• Jesus once caused a sick man to arise on the Sabbath and take up his bed, whereupon the pious of the land raised a great outcry. But Jesus answered with superior contempt that the Sabbath was there for the sake of man, not man for the sake of the Sabbath; consequently, man was also master over the Sabbath.

  Alfred Rosenberg

  Jesus, Men, Land

  "The Myth of the Twentieth Century". Book by Alfred Rosenberg, p. 229, 1930.

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• Unfortunately, in Hollywood, there are those directors that have some contempt for actors. We've all experienced that, in one way or another.

  Vin Diesel

  Directors, Hollywood, Actors

  "Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Benicio Del Toro, Vin Diesel and James Gunn Talk GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. July 28, 2014.

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• True religion is the foundation of society. When that is once shaken by contempt, the whole fabric cannot be stable nor lasting.

  Edmund Burke

  Religion, Foundation, Fabric

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• where families suffer from disasters that are preventable, this is a measure of a whole nation's neglect. A society imperils its own future when, out of negligence or contempt, it overlooks the need of children to be reared in a family ... or when, in the midst of plenty, some families cannot give their children adequate food and shelter, safe activity and rest, and an opportunity to grow into full adulthood as people who can care for and cherish other human beings like themselves.

  Margaret Mead

  Family, Children, Opportunity

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• I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature.

  Laurence Sterne

  Vices, Dishonesty, Murder

  Laurence Sterne (1805). “The Works of Laurence Sterne, A. M.: A sentimental journey through France and Italy. The Koran: or, The life, character and sentiments of Tria Juncta in Uno. A political romance”, p.331

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• Contempt for the things people choose of their own free will is, at its heart, contempt for free will.

  James Lileks

  Heart, People, Free Will

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• Contempt for private wrongs was one of the features of ancient morals.

  Joseph Joubert

  Moral, Ancient, Features

  Joseph Joubert (1896). “Pensées of Joubert”

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• Fitz Allen had 'traveled;' and that is generally understood to mean to go abroad and remain a period of time long enough to grow a fierce beard, and fierce mustache, and cultivate a thorough contempt for everything in your own country.

  Fanny Fern

  Country, Travel, Mean

  Fanny Fern (1854). “Fern leaves from Fanny's port-folio”, p.274

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