Quotessence
Home / Topics / Menace Quotes

Menace Quotes

Browse 261 quotes about Menace.

Related topics

Menace Quotes

“The human mind-we have come to observe-tricks out distinctions in principles of oposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow's might. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things. Perhaps this is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the one is also also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we have made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned. Back into our unexamined selves we slunk, until she arrived at our door. (140)”

“But in this case,” he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, “I feel that there is one cliché that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking, therefore, there is to be. “There is undoubtedly a strong possibility, notwithstanding the vagaries of contingency and misfortune, that my son might have fallen—or might, we could say, have voluntarily jumped, in accordance with the ethical codes with which he has been brought up—for a play you have made with some success, although, as I am persuaded you would concede, very little originality.” Plain speaking if you’re Henry James, perhaps.”

“How does one go on after doing such unspeakable things? It's all rather simple, really," he continued, speaking in someone else's voice. "Say to yourself, 'What things?' And it becomes clear...you are blameless. They brought it on themselves. What have they ever done for you except control your life? They tore you away from your sister; they ripped you from your home. Did you ask to be saved? No! Forget them and start over...with us, your true family, my Corcitura, my own.”

“You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.”

“In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. Pollution is growing at a rapid rate. Pollution destroys beauty and menaces health. It cuts down on efficiency, reduces property values and raises taxes. Almost all these wastes and pollutions are the result of activities carried on for the benefit of man. A prime national goal must be an environment that is pleasing to the senses and healthy to live in. Our Government is already doing much in this field. We have made significant progress. But more must be done.”

“After visiting these places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.”

“It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.”

“I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.”

“I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality.”

“Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.”

“Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.”

“I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government--but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops.”

“What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say "I want to rule the world," and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!”

“You, sleeping on your bed of nails. Weeping an ocean beyond the pale. Strange, sorrow is your greatest skill. You're suffering from overkill... Choose whether to laugh or to cry. Menace and promise mingle in your eye. Wait, it's only a matter of time. You know everything will be fine... Rain falls down and the seas run high. When you're by my side we can rise above it. Let me dry all the tears inside. On your way you cannot hide from the howling wind and the roaring tide. You might get hurt but your fears will subside when you at last escape from the tears inside.”

“The Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.”