Pathetic Quotes - Page 5

• It's kind of pathetic actually that we are all sitting here talking about Forth. It is not the wave of the future. It's never been the wave of the future. It's not within our power to make it the wave of the future.

  Charles H. Moore

  Talking, Sitting, Language

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• I sought to reform minstrelsy among refined people by making words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order. ... Some of my songs should be performed in a pathetic, not a comic style.

  Stephen Foster

  Song, Order, People

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• Maybe that whole love thing is just a grown-up version of Santa Claus; just a myth we've been fed since childhood. So, we keep buying magazines, joining clubs, and doing therapy and watching movies with hit pop songs played over love montages all in a pathetic attempt to explain why our love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney.

  Meg Ryan

  Song, Childhood, Joining

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• That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!

  Henry David Thoreau

  Knowledge, Thinking, Gone

  Henry David Thoreau (1873). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.406

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• Teenage girls are extremists who see the world in black-and- white terms, missing shades of gray. Life is either marvelous or notworth living. School is either pure torment or is going fantastically. Other people are either great or horrible, and they themselves are wonderful or pathetic failures. One day a girl will refer to herself as "the goddess of social life" and the next day she'll regret that she's the "ultimate in nerdosity.

  Mary Pipher

  Girl, Teenage, Regret

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• ... the hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Sympathy, Children, Humanity

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2016). “Elizabeth Cady Stanton: As Revealed in Her Letters & Diary (Abridged)”, p.233, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.

  Margaret Fuller

  Mistake, Loneliness, Mountain

  Margaret Fuller, Arthur Buckminster Fuller (1874). “Memoirs, [ed.] by R.W. Emerson, W.H. Channing, and J.F. Clarke”, p.173

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• The passive ironic attitude is not cool or romantic, but pathetic and destructive.

  Robert Greene

  Attitude, Ironic, Passive

  Twitter post from Apr 19, 2015

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• One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Civilization, Decay, Moments

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• The 'tide in the affairs of men' does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late...'

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Civilization, Climate

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.121, Beacon Press

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• An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish: America and American influence have educated them.

  Oscar Wilde

  Country, Home, America

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• Stop bothering me with your pathetic politics - I'd rather go to the whorehouse.

  Otto Dix

  Bother

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• Their attitude is, 'okay, I am the customer. You are supposed to entertain me.' It's kind of a passive attitude they're taking, and to me it's kind of a pathetic thing. They do not know how interesting it is if you move one step further and try to challenge yourself with more advanced games.

  Shigeru Miyamoto

  Attitude, Moving, Games

  "Nintendo’s Miyamoto Talks Passive Attitude of Casual Gamers, it’s 'a Pathetic Thing'" by Joey Davidson, www.technobuffalo.com. August 31, 2014.

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• If Congress were to pass a 'flat' tax, you'd simply pay a fixed percentage of your income, and you wouldn't have to fill out any complicated forms, and there would be no loopholes for politically connected groups, and normal people would actually understand the tax laws, and giant talking broccoli stalks would come around and mow your lawn for free, because Congress is NOT going to pass a flat tax, you pathetic fool.

  Dave Barry

  Talking, Law, People

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• Dinner was meat - not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain - which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.

  Clive James

  Funny, Girl, Humorous

  Clive James (2013). “The Complete Unreliable Memoirs”, p.286, Pan Macmillan

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• I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

  Barack Obama

  Inspirational, Dream, Moving

  "The Audacity of Hope". Book by Barack Obama, www.npr.org. October 17, 2006.

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• Which is why you deal with demons. (Acheron) Who are even more pathetic than humans when you think about it. Personally, I’d rather play video games. Wouldn’t it be great if we could suck the souls of the people we hated into the box, shoot them down and then dance on their entrails? (Jaden)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Thinking, Games, Play

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2011). “Acheron”, p.490, Hachette UK

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• I don't care about fashion at all. And I know it's kind of a dodgy thing to be a fashion photographer, a kind of pathetic occupation, but I like it, even though I question it.

  Jurgen Teller

  Fashion, Care, Occupation

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• Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.

  Young-Ha Kim

  Reality, Events, Fiction

  Young-ha Kim (2007). “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself”, p.52, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I'm about as big a star as the Baha'i faith has got, which is pretty pathetic.

  Rainn Wilson

  Stars, Baha, Bigs

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• Unless I have my aunt or my boyfriend to take care of me, I'm a little pathetic.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Aunt, My Boyfriend, Care

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• I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

  Tom Stoppard

  Littles, Offended

  "Tom Stoppard: 'I'm the crank in the bus queue'". Interview with Mark Lawson, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2010.

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• You either evolve or you don't. I don't like old people on a rock n' roll stage. I think they look pathetic, me included. And the fact that I represent an era means I can't just go out there and do all new stuff. They would all say, 'Sing 'White Rabbit,'' and I'd say no? That's rude.

  Grace Slick

  Mean, Thinking, Rocks

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• So I take it you guys are going to stay inside my flat and not out in the hallway like my father’s guards? (Kiara) You know that’s the most pathetic way to guard someone. (In a falsetto he added.) Please protect my life by being outside so that when they come in and kill me you can’t hear it. (Syn)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Father, Guy, Way

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2016). “The League: Nemesis Rising, Books 1-3: Born of Night, Born of Fire, Born of Ice”, p.127, Macmillan

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• Adieu, Lord Dain,” she answered without turning her head. “Have a pleasant evening with your cows.” Cows? She was merely trying to provoke him, Dain told himself. The remark was a pathetic attempt at a setdown. To take offense was to admit he’d felt the sting. He told himself to laugh and return to his… cows.

  Loretta Chase

  Laughing, Trying, Cows

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