Insult Quotes - Page 14

• Criticism, analysis, and insults are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Communication, Expression, Criticism

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• He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful.

  Mario Puzo

  Powerful, Revenge, Humble

  "The Godfather".

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• I always asked for forgiveness for my sins right away but I never accepted it until I felt right that I had suffered enough to pay for it. God revealed to me what I was doing how much unnecessary pain I was causing myself. He even showed me that what I was doing was an insult to Jesus that in essence I was saying Lord the sacrifice of Your life and blood was good but not good enough. I must add my work of feeling guilty before I can be forgiven.

  Joyce Meyer

  Jesus, Pain, Sacrifice

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• Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

  Robert McKee

  Lying, Meaning Of Life, Emotion

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• Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Sex, Dirt, Comeback

  Phoenix "Pornography and Obscenity" ch. 3 (1936)

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• When an evil-doer, seeing you practise goodness, comes and maliciously insults you, you should patiently endure it and not feel angry with him, for the evil-doer is insulting himself by trying to insult you.

  Gautama Buddha

  Insults You, Evil, Meditation

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• It seems an insult to nature and to the Creator to imagine that pregnancy was ever intended to be a sickness.

  Eliza Bisbee Duffey

  Pregnancy, Sickness, Imagine

  Eliza Bisbee Duffey (1873). “What Women Should Know: A Woman's Book about Women, Containing Practical Information for Wives and Mothers”, p.165

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• It's not fear of striking out that makes me reluctant to step up to the plate. It's the fear of getting hit in the head by a 90 mph fastball, the pitcher coming off of the mound to stomp me with her cleats while I am down, the rest of the opposing team rushing out of the dugout hurling insults as they kick me and spit on me, while all along the crowd in the stands is cheering them on and laughing at my failure. So, no, it's not the fear of striking out that keeps me from stepping up to the plate.

  Jim Copeland

  Cheer, Fear, Team

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• To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

  Ruth Rendell

  Character, Cutting, Christie

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• The poet’s life is just so much crenellated waste, nights and days whipping swiftly or laboriously past the cinematic window. We’re hunched and weaving over the keys of our green our grey or pink blue manual typewriter maybe a darker stone cold thoritative selectric with its orgasmic expectant hum and us popping pills and laughing over what you or I just wrote, wondering if that line means insult or sex. Or both. Usually both.

  Eileen Myles

  Sex, Mean, Past

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• The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

  Anais Nin

  Fighting, Men, People

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• How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Honesty, Integrity, Lying

  "The Ordeal of Mansart". Book by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1957.

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• She took a bad tumble. Those are some nasty bruises she's carrying," the maid said with a sad shake of the head. "Aye," Cullen agreed, his eyes traveling over lovely, milky white skin, interrupted by several black bruises. "She looks like a cow." Mildrede turned a horrified gaze on him at the comment, but he was more concerned by the choked sound that came from his bride. He really hadn't meant it as an insult, but it seemed the women were taking it so. "I just meant the coloring," Cullen muttered

  Lynsay Sands

  Eye, White, Lovely

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• We are searching for the same thing,” Stripey said. “How do you know?” Janco asked. “I read his mind.” The Sitian pointed to Ari. “Yours was too…chaotic. Too many useless thoughts to wade through.” A compliment or an insult? Janco guessed compliment and preened.

  Maria V. Snyder

  Mind, Wade, Useless

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• You are so obtuse!" Brontë says, exasperated. I am calm in my response. "Do you mean stupid, or angular? You need to be more specific with your insults.

  Neal Shusterman

  Stupid, Mean, Needs

  Neal Shusterman (2010). “Bruiser”, p.27, Harper Collins

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• Life is nothing in itself. It’s a place marker that proves who’s winning, and we are the winners. We are always the winners. There is nothing but the winning. Even winning means nothing. We win because it’s an insult to lose. The ends don’t justify the means. The means don’t justify the ends. There is no one to justify to. There is no justice.” ~ Durzo Blint

  Brent Weeks

  Mean, Winning, Justice

  Brent Weeks (2009). “The Way Of Shadows: Book 1 of the Night Angel”, p.138, Hachette UK

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• The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend, and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.

  Laura Moriarty

  Cutting, Trying, Window

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• She's pretty." (It's amazing how girls can say this and make it the most withering insult.)

  Ned Vizzini

  Girl, Withering

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• It is not he who gives abuse that affronts, but the view that we take of it as insulting; so that when one provokes you it is your own opinion which is provoking.

  Epictetus

  Views, Giving, Insulting

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• REPARTEE, n. Prudent insult in retort. Practiced by gentlemen with a constitutional aversion to violence, but a strong disposition to offend. In a war of words, the tactics of the North American Indian.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Strong, War, Gentleman

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.197, University of Georgia Press

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• No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.

  Paul Gallico

  Inspirational, Rude, Insulting

  The New York Times, January 14, 1962.

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• People have been trained to criticize, insult, and otherwise communicate in ways that create distance among people.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Distance, Communication, People

  Marshall B. Rosenberg (2004). “We Can Work it Out: Resolving Conflicts Peacefully and Powerfully”, p.9, PuddleDancer Press

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• Nonviolent Communication shows us a way of being very honest, but without any criticism, without any insults, without any put-downs, without any intellectual diagnosis implying wrongness.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Communication, Intellectual, Criticism

  "Teaching Children Compassionately: How Students and Teachers Can Succeed with Mutual Understanding".

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• My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!

  D. H. Lawrence

  Dirty, Cabbage, Juice

  Letter to Aldous and Maria Huxley, 15 August 1928, in H. T. Moore (ed.) 'Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence' (1962) vol. 2

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• Legalized abortion is a national holocaust; an affront to our national character; a contradiction of established principles subscribed to from the beginning of Western Civilization; an insult to the principles of our Declaration of Independence; a bane of our national spirit; and a stench in the nostrils of Almighty God.

  Chuck Baldwin

  Character, Civilization, Abortion

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