Sanctimonious Quotes

• I have a zero tolerance for sanctimonious morons who try to scare people.

  Pat Robertson

  Zero, People, Tolerance

  "Liberals pride themselves on being tolerant. Are they really just suckers?" by Sally Kohn, www.washingtonpost.com. April 15, 2011.

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• He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.

  Mark Twain

  Sarcastic, Waiting, Vacancy

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• Pompous asses knows how to put the moan in sanctimonious.

  Andy Hargreaves

  Leadership, Learning, Ass

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• Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Age, Ark

  1816 Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 Jul.

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• The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Atheist, Religion, Tragedy

  "Credo". Essay by Arthur C. Clarke (1991), later published in Arthur C. Clarke "Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998" (p. 360), 1999.

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• The last thing I want to be is sanctimonious, but the thing that frustrates me is the deceit and betrayal, how there's one rule for males and another for females.

  James Walsh

  Betrayal, Lying, Males

  "Ups, downs and working with a legend" by Todd Leopold, www.cnn.com. May 6, 2004.

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• Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.

  Victor Hugo

  Running, Men, Bully

  Victor Hugo (2000). “Les Mis??rables”, p.577, Modern Library

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• I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy.

  Ralph Thomas Walker

  Scorn

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• Laws and Institutions Must Go Hand in Hand with the Progress of the Human Mind.

  Francis Bacon

  Hands, Law, Mind

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• What will the preachers say? .. to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all alike.

  Voltaire

  Men, Burning, Earth

  Francois Voltaire (1977). “The Portable Voltaire”, p.348, Penguin

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• I have a liberal definition of news because I think news can be what excites people. I'm not very sanctimonious about what news is and isn't.

  Diane Sawyer

  Thinking, Media, People

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• You see everything depends upon the psychological headquarters from which we live. 'Where am I living from?' Ask yourself that question. If you don't like your headquarters, you can move any time you like. Break away. Don't tell anyone about it. Others will either smile tolerantly or mouth sanctimonious babble. Make your escape plans in secret. Never mind if you lose certain friends, you will find others who also have dared. They will be ten-thousand times more valuable to you.

  Vernon Howard

  Moving, Mind, Secret

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• Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone

  Denise Mina

  Attitude, Animal, People

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• Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Book, Reading

  1816 Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 Jul.

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• Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. . . . We might as well require a man to wear the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Boys, Men, Hands

  Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816

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• The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.

  Norman Tebbit

  Home, Sunset, Views

  The Independent, February 24, 1990.

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• (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Cities, Canada, Portraits

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• I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Hurt, Prayer, Believe

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• The ethical practices of lawyers are probably no worse than those of other professions. Lawyers bring some of the trouble on by claiming in a sanctimonious way that they are interested only in justice, not power or wealth. They also suffer guilt by association. Their clients are often people in trouble. Saints need no lawyers: gangsters do.

  Lawrence M. Friedman

  Practice, Justice, People

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• There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.

  Edward Hoagland

  Two, Kind

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• The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

  Susan Sontag

  Party, Reality, Self

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.142, Macmillan

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• Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free - indeed, sanctimonious - way for "progressives" to be racists.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Perfect, Guilt, Racist

  "All the Trouble in the World. The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague and Poverty". Book by P. J. O'Rourke, 1994.

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• The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. However valuable-even necessary-that may have been in enforcing good behavior on primitive peoples, their association is now counterproductive. Yet at the very moment when they should be decoupled, sanctimonious nitwits are calling for a return to morals based on superstition.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Tragedy, Calling, Hijacking

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• I have a big problem when the sanctimonious, holier than thou congressmen and women go on national television for six hours and beat somebody up with a stick, and not because I'm 'Ms. Manners.' That's not what bothers me. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

  Bernard Goldberg

  Glasses, People, House

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• The vermin explain their sin with sanctimonious language like, "We've prayed about it and sought counsel, and we feel it's the right thing to do." Don't let it down on them that to the Enemy what they feel is inconsequential. His moral laws don't give a rip about how any of them feel. The sludgebags have no more power to vote them in and out of existence than they have power to revoke the law of gravity.

  Randy Alcorn

  Rip, Law, Giving

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