Epithet Quotes

• I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.

  Gloria Steinem

  Thinking, Names, People

  "The Humanist Interview with Gloria Steinem" by Jennifer Bardi, thehumanist.com. August 14, 2012.

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• In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

  Paul Gauguin

  Art, Done, Revolutionary

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

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• Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Children, Women, Weakness

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2013). “Vindication of the Rights of Women”, p.17, Lulu.com

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• Insolence is not logic; epithets are the arguments of malice.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Logic, Argument, Insolence

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.1647, Library of Alexandria

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• If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.

  Howard Thurman

  Men, Order, Equilibrium

  Howard Thurman (2014). “A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life”, p.143, Beacon Press

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• A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Lying, Way, Facts

  "Of Books". "Characters", Book by Jean De La Bruyère, www.ourcivilisation.com. 1688.

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• I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .

  John Stuart Mill

  Mean, Calling, Hell

  'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy' (1865) ch. 7

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• Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Common Sense, Superstitions, Blasphemy

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.1217, Library of Alexandria

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• For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.

  Charles Lamb

  Dog, Gentleman, Sake

  Letter to Coleridge, August 6, 1800.

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• As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Feminist, Feminism, Revolution

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

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• Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.

  James Russell Lowell

  Men, Feelings, Degrees

  James Russell Lowell (1870). “Among My Books: First [-second] series”, p.326

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• Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!

  Lewis Carroll

  Writing, Zest, Giving

  Lewis Carroll (2001). “Jabberwocky and Other Poems”, p.33, Courier Corporation

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• What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary.

  David Hume

  Simple, Praise, Reproach

  David Hume (2010). “Moral and Political Philosophy”, p.262, Simon and Schuster

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• Do not beat up on yourself. Do not criticize your writing as lousy, inadequate, stupid, or any of the evil epithets that you are used to heaping on yourself. Such self-bashing is never useful. If you indulge in it, your writing doesn't stand a chance. So when your mind turns on you, turn it back, stamp it down, shut it up, and keep writing.

  Gail Carson Levine

  Stupid, Writing, Self

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• An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Metaphor, Degrade

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper: Including the Series Edited with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical”, p.141

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• Women still have an uneasy relationship with power and the traits necessary to be a leader. There is this internalized fear that if we are really powerful, we are going to be considered ruthless or pushy or strident - all of those epithets that strike right at our femininity. We are still working at trying to overcome the fear that power and womanliness are mutually exclusive.

  Arianna Huffington

  Powerful, Leader, Trying

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• Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Nerd, Poor

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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• Ah fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee.

  Christopher Marlowe

  Divinity, Divine, Foul

  'Tamburlaine the Great' (1590) act 5, sc. 5

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• The epithets of parent and child have been long applied to Great Britain and her colonies, [but] we rarely see anything from your side of the water except the authoritative style of a master to a school-boy.

  George Mason

  Children, School, Boys

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• Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.

  Oscar Romero

  Mad, Upside Down, Communist

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• The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees.

  Enver Hoxha

  Thinking, Honor, Mind

  Enver Hoxha (1974). “On Further Revolutionizing Our Party and the Life of Our Country as a Whole: Speeches 1967-1968”

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• The use of 'conspiracy theory' as a derogatory - as an epithet almost - is something the propagandists have perfected over the decades, and it's a useful tool for eliminating articulate dissent and other points of view, and information that might be inconvenient for a policy agenda.

  Chris Sanders

  Views, Use, Agendas

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• Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art. The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor's epithet was Lady of the Sycamore.

  Larry Gates

  Life, Art, Egypt

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• I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Heart, Mind, Wish

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2012). “Mary, A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria”, p.303, Broadview Press

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• I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

  Jane Austen

  Numbers, Enemy, Joining

  Jane Austen (2005). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen”, p.1089, Wordsworth Editions

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