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Contempt Quotes

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Contempt Quotes

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

StrengthRacismPityContemptAfrican AmericansBlacksDualityAmericans
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.”

MenPassionMathematicsInstrumentsChessUncertaintyReasoningContempt
Book:Felix Holt: The Radical
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“Those who realize that the house is burning can be led to look with disdain and contempt upon their peers who seem not to realize it. And yet won’t these people who do not see and do not think be precisely the lemurs to whom you will have to answer on the last day? Realizing that the house is burning does not raise you above the others: on the contrary, they are the ones with whom you will have to exchange a last glance when the flames draw nearer. What will you be able to say to justify your supposed conscience to these people who are so unknowing that they almost seem innocent?”

EvilKnowingConscienceTraumaDisasterContemptNot KnowingCognizance
Book:When the House Burns Down: From the Dialect of Thought
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“Laziness can be a value on its own for those who want to show supremacy through contempt for work and wish to be free individuals by fighting the enslavement to labor. While they don’t want to become dependent on ‘wage slavery’ and their livelihood only hinges on salaries, they feel confined to a social stratification, causing a collective stigma that results in poverty and underfeeding. (The daily job)”

WorkPovertyValueContemptLazinessStigmaEnslavementWage SlaverySocial StratificationSupremecy
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“It contained a sad, but too common story of the hard-heartedness of the wealthy, and the misery endured by the children of the highborn. Blood is not water, it is said, but gold with them is dearer far than the ties of nature; to keep and augment their possessions being the aim and end of their lives, the existence, and, more especially, the happiness of their children, appears to them a consideration at once trivial and impertinent, when it would compete with family views and family greatness. To this common and and iniquitous feeling these luckless beings were sacrificed; they had endured the worst, and could be injured no more; but their orphan child was a living victim, less thought of than the progeny of the meanest animal which might serve to augment their possessions. Mrs. Baker felt some complacency on reading this letter; with the common English respect for wealth and rank, she was glad to find that her humble roof had sheltered a man who was the son — she did not exactly know of whom, but of somebody, who had younger sons and elder sons, and possessed, through wealth, the power of behaving frightfully ill to a vast number of persons.”

EvilWealthPrideGreedPrivilegeContempt
Book:Falkner
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“The risibility of our altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people. Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation. To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.”

RespectContemptAltruismDifferenceOthernessIncomprehension
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Soon he essentially stopped talking. "I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode," he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised," he wrote, "by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.”

SilenceTalkingPleaseQuietNormalComfortableRespectWordsContemptThank YouPuzzlesNoYesSurprisedDefensiveGuardsRetreatingIntimidates
Book:The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
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“It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years to form a language; that it is of exceedingly slow growth. We also know that by language, man conveys to his fellows the impressions made upon him by what he sees, hears, smells and touches. We know that the language of the savage consists of a few sounds, capable of expressing only a few ideas or states of the mind, such as love, desire, fear, hatred, aversion and contempt. Many centuries are required to produce a language capable of expressing complex ideas. It does not seem to me that ideas can be manufactured by a deity and put in the brain of man. These ideas must be the result of observation and experience.”

LoveIdeasDesireLanguageFearGrowthBrainKnowledgeFantasyExpressionBibleHatredExperienceMythSensesObservationContemptSerpentAversionAdam And EveGarden Of EdenThe BibleFableImpressionsSavageDeityCenturies
Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.”

LoveGodInspirationQuotesImaginationBeautyCreativeHonorDiversityRacismAppreciationContemptCreateSkin ColorConciousness
Book:From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence
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“The girls, their feet in the cold water, utter cries like a seagull's. Moreover, they are immediately transformed into seagulls, and these in turn into the obscure object of desire, swaying and waddling like the ostrich at the end of Buñuel's film. The summer has arrived. I was very anxious she might be disappointed and I could never have forgiven her for that. I shall never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous judgement on America. They are at the centre of the world and they don't know it. What they prefer is to be at the centre of books and the earth. Only sequoias have the heroic, fabulous, antediluvian stature of the first days of the world, being contemporary with the great prehistoric animals. And indeed their scaley bark resembles a carapace. They are the only trees on a par with the geological and mineral scenario of the deserts. After them it is the little species that have triumphed.”

AmericaEvolutionUniversalDisappointmentContemptCondescensionBunuel
Book:Cool memories
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“It is fashionable to present hate and contempt for humanity as the exasperation and despair of compassion, but in that case rebellion should be against existence itself. When a man who is horrified by the basic evil of the world and his own existence, and who sees no God to rebel against, takes revenge on his fellow beings, he is a coward and a hypocrite. Perhaps the ugly, sordid, and horrifying things of which there is no end have always been produced by hypocritical and cowardly rebellion against existence, but that is not the rebellion of the social anarchist.”

SocialExistenceCompassionHatredHypocrisyRebellionAnarchyContemptCowardice
Book:Social Anarchism
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“{Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity} I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at me. I realised something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty. Either I had to come into this immense luminous coop and submit, or I had to declare the Catholic Church, the core and substance of Christendom with all its divines, sages, saints, and martyrs, with successive thousands of believers, age after age, wrong. ...I found my doubt of his essential integrity, and the shadow of contempt it cast, spreading out from him to the whole Church and religion of which he with his wild spoutings about the agonies of Hell, had become the symbol. I felt ashamed to be sitting there in such a bath of credulity.”

ChurchHellIntegrityShameCatholicUglyCrueltyRealizationCatholicismRitualContemptAgonyLieSubmissionCatholic ChurchLuminousBelieversCredulityChristendomMartyrsSagesDreadfulCoopDivines
Author:H.G. Wells
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“Luther's personality as well as his teachings shows ambivalence toward authority. On the one hand he is overawed by authority—that of a worldly authority and that of a tyrannical God—and on the other hand he rebels against authority—that of the Church. He shows the same ambivalence in his attitude toward the masses. As far as they rebel within the limits he has set he is with them. But when they attack the authorities he approves of, an intense hatred and contempt for the masses comes to the fore. […] we shall show that this simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical traits of the "authoritarian character.”

CharacterTyrannyContemptAuthoritarianismMartin LutherMassesAmbivalenceProtestantismLutheranism1941
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.”

InspirationalWritingMindReasonPhilosophyWisdomMotivationalQuotesKnowledgeSpeechWittyWitNoiseCommon SenseVanityLoudArroganceMovieReasonableStoryContemptArrogantRhetoricSayingsCreative WritingSlogansEgotismAmit KalantriAmit Kalantri QuotesPublic SpeakingConceitProverbsSocial NetworkingBloggingCharactersSenseAmit Kalantri WriterDisdainAdageNovel WritingBook WritingEssayMouthSwaggerHubrisScriptAdvertisementBlogSnobberyMovie DialogueScript WritingCatchphrasesAlliterationsTag LinesScriptwritingCatch LinesSpeechwritingCondescensionPunchlineInsolencePretentiousnessBoastingMockingBlusterHaughtinessSelf ImportanceSnobbishnessSneeringSuperciliousnessAffectation ScornBumptiousnessHigh HandednessImmodesty LoftinessImperiousness PrideLordlinessScoffing PresumptionSense Of Superiority PompositySmugness Pretension
Book:Wealth of Words
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“Katika maisha watu wengi hawataki kukuona ukiendelea kwa sababu ukiendelea unakuwa kioo kwao. Ghafla wataanza kukutazama. Wanajua wana akili kama wewe, wamesoma kama wewe, au wana akili kuliko wewe, au wamesoma kuliko wewe, na labda wanazijua sifa zako za udhaifu na sifa zako za ushupavu toka utotoni kwako. Lakini ghafla unakuwa kioo, na wanapojitazama katika hicho kioo, wanajiona taswira zao isipokuwa sasa hawapo mahali ambapo wewe upo. Katika maisha watu watakushauri, watakufitini, watakurubuni na watakukatisha tamaa. Sema hapana kwa ndiyo nyingi kwa sababu hawaoni unachokiona, hawajui unachokifanya na hawajui unapoelekea. Unachokiona ni takdiri ya maisha yako, unachokifanya ni kupanda mbegu na kuzimwagilia kwa imani, na unapoelekea ni kileleni. Hivyo, songa mbele, kuwa wewe daima, wape muda, wape nafasi.”

PeopleLifeFaithDestinyAdviceIntelligenceContemptIntrigueSummitDiscouragingYour LifeMirrorPlaceMove ForwardMaishaImagesWatuSowing SeedsSay NoImaniAkiliMaisha YakoTakdiriSema HapanaTaswiraA Lot Of YesesKiooMahaliNdiyo NyingiUshauriFitinaKukatisha TamaaKurubuniSonga MbeleBe You AlwaysGive Them SpaceGive Them TimeKileleKupanda MbeguKuwa Wewe DaimaSifa Zako Za UdhaifuSifa Zako Za UshupavuWape MudaWape NafasiYour StrengthsYour Weaknesses
Author:Enock Maregesi
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“The belief in Limitation is the basis of all jealousy, and jealousy leads to Possession. Possession is the idea that you must hold tightly to that which you love or it might escape. In truth, it does not escape. It loses its value to the holder and often creates contempt. True power attracts the sweet pleasure of liberation within the harmony of love.”

LovePowerHarmonyPossessionLimitationLiberationJealousyManipulationContemptLove Lost
Author:Deborah Bravandt
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“We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her out of his life, out of his heart. How, even when she reached out to him in distress - Please, Dad, come get me, come save me - all he could do was accuse her. How that same daughter could look at him and feel nothing but contempt and blame and resentment, because that's all that radiated off of him for so many years and it had become contagious.”

AngerBlameParentsContemptResentmentFathers And Daughters
Book:Hate List
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“Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”

DeathForceWomenMarriageSocietyExpectationsHatredInjusticeHypocrisyUnhappinessContemptDecayDemonsFamily RelationshipsScornIdolatryMatrimonyMarried LifeDiscordFamiliesSocial NormsCaptivityDisparityPreconceptionsViceWorldlinessDisgustDomestic LifeDisharmonyLovelessnessFalse BeliefUnfreedom
Book:Shirley
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“Jude ought to be cowed. She was supposed to bow and scrape, to submit and acknowledge his superiority. A little grovelling wouldn't have gone amiss. He would have very much liked it if she begged. 'Give up,' Cardan said, fully expecting that she would. 'Never,' Jude wore an unnerving little smile in the corners of her mouth, as though even she couldn't believe what she was saying. The most infuriating part was that she didn't have to mean it. She was mortal. She could lie. So why wouldn't she? In this, there was no winning for her. And yet, after he told her all the soft, menacing things he could think of, after he left her clambering back up onto the riverbank, he realised he was the one who had retreated. He was the one who backed down. And all through that night and for many nights after, he couldn't rid his thoughts of her. Not the hatred in her eyes. That he understood. That he didn't mind. It warmed him. But the contempt made her feel as though she saw beneath all his sharp and polished edges. It reminded him of how his father and all the Court had seen him, before he learned how to shield himself with villainy. And doomed as she was, he envied her whatever conviction made her stand there and defy him. She ought to be nothing. She ought to be insignificant. She ought not to matter. He had to make her not matter. But every night, Jude haunted him. The coils of her hair. The calluses on her fingers. An absent bite of her lip. It was too much, the way he thought about her. He knew it was too much, but he couldn't stop. It disgusted him that he couldn't stop. He had to make her see that he was her better. To beg his pardon. And grovel. He had to find a way to make her admire him. To kneel before him and plead for his royal mercy. To surrender. To yield.”

ConfusedBullyingContemptHolly BlackThe Folk Of The AirJude DuarteCardan GreenbriarJudeCardan
Book:How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories
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