Euphemism Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• Euphemisms are for the differently brained.

  Spider Robinson

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• It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

  John Green

  Hurt, It Hurts

  John Green (2015). “Looking For Alaska Special 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.189, Penguin

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• The intangibles are a euphemism for we have no idea what we're looking for but we know it when we see it.

  Brian Billick

  Ideas, Knows, No Idea

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• Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Clouds, Computer, Centralization

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• Spoilt is a euphemism for loved.

  James Nesbitt

  Spoilt

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• Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.

  Florence King

  Sex, Mean, Race

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• In the weeks prior to the war to liberate Afghanistan, a good friend of mine would ask me almost every day, “Why aren't we killing people yet?” And I never had a good answer for him. Because one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people. Call it a “forceful response,” “decisive action” ' whatever. Those are all nice euphemisms for killing people. And the world is a better place because America saw the necessity of putting steel beneath the velvet of those euphemisms.

  Jonah Goldberg

  War, Nice, Good Friend

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• We need to make sure that whenever we're engaging in a cyber-warfare campaign, a cyber-espionage campaign in the United States, that we understand the word cyber is used as a euphemism for the internet, because the American public would not be excited to hear that we're doing internet warfare campaigns, internet espionage campaigns, because we realize that we ourselves are impacted by it.

  Edward Snowden

  United States, Warfare, Needs

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Euphemisms, like fashions, have their day and pass, perhaps to return at another time. Like the guests at a masquerade ball, they enjoy social approval only so long as they retain the capacity for deception.

  Freda Adler

  Fashion, Long, Deception

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• The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

  George Orwell

  Latin, Fall, Political Language

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.282, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Euphemism in the workplace does not end with job descriptions. It reaches a pusillanimous peak at the other end of the work process - in dismissal.

  Nigel Rees

  Jobs, Doe, Workplace

  "In other words ..." by Nigel Rees, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2006.

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• We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

  Robert Hughes

  America, Tolerance, Doe

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• It's often the case that when a critic uses an embarrassingly accurate term to describe what a wrong-doer is doing, the wrong-doer protests: "Why don't you use my white-washed, conscience-soothing euphemism?" Such euphemisms, they claim, help promote "civilized debate."

  Steve Kangas

  White, Use, Doers

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• Planned Parenthood's entire existence is basically based on keeping people in the dark through euphemism. You don't call it genocide, you call it reproductive health. So that's why Planned Parenthood has - nobody really thought.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Dark, People, Parenthood

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• I'm with an old family" was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks' cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury [Massachusetts] that you couldn't even understand them.

  Malcolm X

  White, Massachusetts, Maids

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• Once one understands that 'racial tensions' is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.

  Dennis Prager

  Wings, Impact, Black

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• The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.

  Sylvia Plath

  Moving, Weather, White

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.73, Anchor

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• Show some mercy to this chair which has stretched out its arms to you for so long; please satisfy its desire to embrace you!

  Moliere

  Long, Desire, Arms

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• The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Humorous, Thinking

  Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry Does Japan”, p.35, Ballantine Books

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• "Striking looking." That's a euphemism if I ever heard one.

  Ron Perlman

  Heard, Ifs

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• In South America euphemism appears to be the grisly preserve of violent power. 'Liberty' was the name of the biggest prison in Uruguay under the military dictatorship, while in Chile one of the concentration camps was called 'Dignity.' It was the self-styled 'Peace and Justice' paramilitary group in Chiapas [Mexico] that in 1997 shot 45 peasants in the back, nearly all of them women and children, as they prayed in a church. What have the souls of the south done over the past few decades to deserve quite so much liberty and dignity and peace and justice?

  Isabel Fonseca

  Children, Military, Past

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• Although the term dialogue was really a euphemism for scientists trying to kill each other, this format worked very well.

  Joao Magueijo

  Trying, Scientist, Term

  João Magueijo (2004). “Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation”, Penguin Group USA

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• In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

  George Orwell

  Party, Writing, Squares

  George Orwell (2001). “Orwell and Politics”, p.459, Penguin UK

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• I'm waxed clean - hairless as the day as I was born. But don't say 'Tia has no pubic hair.' That's so clinical. Use a nice euphemism. Say 'She's mowed her secret garden' or 'She's cleared the way to the Promised Land.' Because that's what it is, right?

  Tia Carrere

  Nice, Garden, Hair

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