Drivel Quotes

• But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Traveler

  Mark Twain (2008). “The Innocents Abroad”, p.111, Velvet Element Books

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• The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Communication, Poison, Void

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• In a sense, New Age gurus are akin to postmodernists within academia. They dispense meaningless drivel that masquerades as profound truths whilst in reality it is a mere exercise in obscurantism

  Gad Saad

  Exercise, Reality, Profound

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• Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.

  Raymond Chandler

  Writing, Cutting, Thinking

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.49, Univ of California Press

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• So-called 'sustainable development' is meaningless drivel.

  James Lovelock

  Development, Sustainable Development, Meaningless

  "James Lovelock on shale gas and the problem with 'greens'". Interview with Leo Hickman, www.theguardian.com. June 15, 2012.

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• All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

  Margaret Atwood

  Wolf Packs, Stories, Sentimental

  Margaret Atwood (2000). “The Blind Assassin”, Random House Large Print Publishing

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• While you're being creative, nothing is wrong. There's no such thing as a mistake, and any drivel may lead to the breakthrough.

  John Cleese

  Mistake, Creative, May

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• He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

  James Joyce

  Water, Jesus Christ, Atheism

  James Joyce (2016). “The Complete Works of James Joyce: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Poetry, Essays & Letters: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, The Cat and the Devil, Exiles, Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Stephen Hero, Giacomo Joyce, Critical Writings & more”, p.2022, e-artnow

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• I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Dream, Real, People

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Invitation to a Beheading”, p.29, Penguin UK

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• Despite official drivel about clean bombs and tactical nuclear weapons, anyone who can read a newspaper or listen to a radio knows that some of us mortals have the power to destroy the human race and man's home on earth. We need not even make war; only by preparing, by playing with our new weapons, we poison the air, the water, the soil of our plants, damage the health of the living, and weaken the chances of the newborn.

  Martha Gellhorn

  War, Home, Men

  Martha Gellhorn (1959). “The Face of War”

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• All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel. ...Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

  Margaret Atwood

  Running, Fighting, Thinking

  "The Blind Assassin". Book by Margaret Atwood, 2000.

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• Star Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurist drivel; ‘Star Trek’ can turn your brains into puree of bat guano; and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!

  Harlan Ellison

  Stars, War, Doctors

  "Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang". Book by Terrance Dicks. Introduction, p. 7, 1977.

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• The vacuum created by a failure to communicate will quickly be filled with rumor, misrepresentations, drivel, and poison.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Rumor, Vacuums, Poison

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• What drivel it all is!... A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other stringscalled political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they'll murder their neighbours for using a word they don't happen to like. A word that probably doesn't mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Mean, People

  Aldous Huxley (2015). “After Many a Summer”, p.54, Random House

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• They just talk drivel. Whoever is winning is great, whoever isn't, isn't. It's banal. And also semi-literate at times ... they never criticise in an intelligent way. Anything that isn't banal is said to be an outburst. They've created this cartoon world where everyone talks like Lineker and says nothing.

  Eamon Dunphy

  Memorable, Intelligent, Winning

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• The greatest danger to Christianity is, I contend, not heresies, not heterodoxies, not atheists, not profane secularism - no, but the kind of orthodoxy which is cordial drivel, mediocrity served up sweet. There is nothing that so insidiously displaces the majestic as cordiality.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Christian, Sweet, Atheist

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• The Reverend Douglas Wilson may not be a professional historian, as his detractors say, but he has a strong grasp of the essentials of the history of slavery and its relation to Christian doctrine. Indeed, sad to say, his grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms. And the Reverend Mr. Wilson is a fighter, especially effective in defense of Christianity against those who try to turn Jesus' way of salvation into pseudo-moralistic drivel.

  Eugene Genovese

  Christian, Strong, Jesus

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• We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.

  Mark Twain

  Travel, Lying, Vanity

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• Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.

  Camille Paglia

  Syllabus, Students, Study

  Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.75, Canongate Books

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• The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood.

  George Grosz

  Art, Teaching, Engineering

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• Cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--science, mathematics, energy, history, experience--and the more experience you have, the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create.

  Julia Child

  Creativity, Drawing, Creative

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• It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Thinking, People

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Jul 09, 2011

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• Sorry, boyfriends everywhere—you’re doomed to sit through an hour and forty-seven minutes of syrupy drivel. The payoff? Between my face, Tadd’s abs and Quinton’s biceps, your girl will be ready for takeoff as soon as the credits roll. You’re welcome.

  Tammara Webber

  Girl, Sorry, Biceps

  Tammara Webber (2014). “Between the Lines: The Complete Series”, p.568, Tammara Webber

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• The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives." We don't care. We have each other.... While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our "CONFIG.SYS."

  Dave Barry

  Mean, Intelligent, People

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• The result is a twitching convulsion of vicious drivel passing itself off as a movie, which can be best appreciated by the kind of people who dig Showgirls, the Saw franchise and Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman flicks.

  Rex Reed

  People, Saws, Kind

  "Going to the Dogs: With 'Seven Psychopaths,' The Once-Masterful McDonagh Stays Bent on an Ill-Advised Hiatus from Theater" by Rex Reed, observer.com. October 9, 2012.

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