Pernicious Quotes - Page 5

• Pernicious weed! whose scent the fair annoys, Unfriendly to society's chief joys: Thy worst effect is banishing for hours The sex whose presence civilizes ours.

  William Cowper

  Weed, Sex, Joy

  William Cowper, Robert Southey, William Harvey (1835). “The Works of William Cowper, Comprising His Poems, Correspondence, and Translations”, p.163

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• Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong.

  Gerry Spence

  Ideas, America, Long

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• I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual and moral cowards.

  William Borah

  Intellectual, Coward, Looks

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• Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.

  Carl Sagan

  Sex, Children, Real

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• Nationality was the most pernicious, depersonalizing, homogenizing label that could ever be attached to the human individual.

  Rolf Hochhuth

  Labels, Individual, Humans

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• The worship of words is more pernicious than the worship of images. Grammatolatry is the worst species of idolatry.

  Robert Dale Owen

  Worship, Worst, Idolatry

  Robert Dale Owen (1871). “The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next: With Illustrative Narrations”, p.102

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• The vast majority of psychopaths, like an iceberg, are underwater, and like an iceberg, they are inert. They do nothing. They're just there. They torment their spouse by being unempathic, but they don't beat her or kill her. They bully coworkers, but they don't burn the office. They are not dramatic. They are pernicious. Most psychopaths are subtle. They are more like poison than a knife, and they are more like slow-working poison than cyanide.

  Sam Vaknin

  Knives, Office, Bully

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• It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.

  Anita Sarkeesian

  Inspirational, Media, Criticism

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• The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.

  Toni Morrison

  Ideas, Should Have, World

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• The most damnable and pernicious heresy that has ever plagued the mind of man was the idea that somehow he could make himself good enough to deserve to live with an all-holy God.

  Martin Luther

  Men, Ideas, Mind

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• Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation on Thursday, leaves a dismal legacy at the Justice Department, but one of his legal innovations was especially pernicious: the demonizing of state attempts to ensure honest elections.

  Edwin Meese

  Justice, Innovation, Thursday

  "Holder's Legacy of Racial Politics" by Meese & Blackwell, www.realclearpolitics.com. September 29, 2014.

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• I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.

  Mark Twain

  Men, Rights, Average

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.407, Courier Corporation

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• More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.

  Emma Goldman

  Class, Majority, Dictator

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.

  John Adams

  Running, Democracies Have, Long

  John Adams (2001). “The Political Writings of John Adams”, p.405, Regnery Publishing

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• Comics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian.

  Art Spiegelman

  Propaganda, Fascists

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• How dangerous it is for our salvation, how unworthy of God and of ourselves, how pernicious even for the peace of our hearts, to want always to stay where we are! Our whole life was only given us to advance us by great strides toward our heavenly country.

  Francois Fenelon

  Country, Heart, Want

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• That pernicious sentiment, "Our country, right or wrong."

  James Russell Lowell

  Country, Sentiments, Our Country

  James Russell Lowell (1898). “Poems of James Russell Lowell With Biographical Sketch by Nathan Haskell Dole”, p.521, Library of Alexandria

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• There is no moral difference between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on the race track and gambling in the stock market. One method is just pernicious to the body politic as the other kind.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Gambling, Race, Differences

  United States. President (1901-1909 : Roosevelt), Theodore Roosevelt (1908). “The Roosevelt Policy: Speeches, Letters and State Papers, Relating to Corporate Wealth and Closely Allied Topics, of Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States”

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• Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

  Bertrand Russell

  Thinking, Use, Opinion

  Bertrand Russell (1972). “The Collected Stories of Bertrand Russell”, London : G. Allen & Unwin

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• Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet.

  Dani Shapiro

  Color, Sick, Grace

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• New and expanded refundable tax credits would raise the fraction of taxpayers paying no income taxes to almost 50% from 38%. This is potentially the most pernicious feature of the president's budget, because it would cement a permanent voting majority with no stake in controlling the cost of general government.

  Michael J. Boskin

  Government, Voting, President

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• The most pernicious of his [Obama] proposals will be the massive Make Work Pay refundable tax credit. Dressed up as a tax cut, it will be a national welfare program, guaranteeing a majority of American households an annual check to 'refund' taxes they never paid. And it will eliminate the need for about 20% of American households to pay income taxes, lifting the proportion that need not do so to a majority of the voting population.

  Dick Morris

  Cutting, Welfare Programs, Voting

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• The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skillful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion . . .

  Edward Gibbon

  War, Hero, Blood

  Edward Gibbon, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, Theodore Roosevelt (2012). “The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812”, p.1712, Modern Library

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• Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Intellectual, Creationism, Perversion

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• Theological error is the most pernicious of errors; it strikes at man's center and separates him from his Creator and Redeemer. God insisted not only that Israelites should judge their own hearts and cast aside falsehood about Him but that they should also confront it wherever it emerged.

  Max Anders

  Heart, Men, Errors

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