Top 100 Appalling Quotes
#1. People say things about me all the time and I get over it. I've had some appalling things told about me.
Boy George
#2. One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.
Glenn T. Seaborg
#3. The real story of the Ground Zero mosque is that the project only became feasible because of the appalling and astonishing fecklessness of the officials who were charged with the reconstruction of the site and the neighborhood all the way back in 2001.
John Podhoretz
#4. We must face the appalling fact that we have been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican Parties.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#5. He has many things I haven't got," said Jace. "Like nearsightedness, bad posture, and an appalling lack of coordination."
-Jace about Simon, pg. 331-
Cassandra Clare
#6. The invisibility in which we live next to one another is appalling, Kukla thought.
Dubravka Ugresic
#7. I never dreamed I'd owe my life to such an appalling article of clothing,
Ransom Riggs
#8. I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society ... unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.
Tina Fey
#9. He saw with sudden awful clarity that if he turned tail now and if, by some appalling miracle, she should survive, he'd never hear the end of it. She'd latch onto his flawed character and hold it up for relentless ridicule till the end of time, or thereabouts.
Helen Hodgman
#10. For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
Herman Melville
#11. Anti-Semitism hits me on the head: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.
Frantz Fanon
#12. Whether you like the label 'Anthropocene' or not, whether you find the prospect of what it signifies inevitable or appalling (or both), the time has come to address its implications, as these thoughtful, battle-tested authors attempt to do. The time has long since come.
David Quammen
#13. Life is a breathing-space between two eternities, a holiday with appalling realities behind and before.
Louise Imogen Guiney
#14. Sometimes the only way to make palatable that which is appalling and apprehensive is to season it with some humor.
Terrence Howard
#15. Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there's a God or not.
Nick Harkaway
#16. A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
Tennessee Williams
#17. People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.
Susan Sontag
#18. I've had my run-ins with department stores, like Harrods, which stopped selling fur coats, but I found some there with fur trim, which is just as disgusting. Foie gras production is appalling - there's no excuse for selling it.
Joanna Lumley
#19. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.
Katherine Mansfield
#20. With each shimmy, the bugle beads on their scandalously revealing costumes swung and shook. It was the sort of display Evie knew her mother would have found appalling - an example of the moral decay of the young generation. It was sexual and dangerous and thrilling, and Evie wanted more of it.
Libba Bray
#21. I'm gonna give one of 'em my virginity one day." She preened. I was momentarily dumbstruck. I couldn't begin to enumerate all the things that were appalling about that possibility. "We so have to talk," I finally managed.
Karen Marie Moning
#22. It is appalling that President Obama would cut off federal health care dollars to Florida in an effort to force our state further into Obamacare.
Rick Scott
#23. Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty.
William Gay
#24. The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.
Alex Haley
#25. The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
Stephen Rea
#26. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.
Diane Setterfield
#27. The mindless rejoicing at home is really appalling; it makes me fear that the first blow against Tokyo will make them wilt at once ... I only wish that [the Americans] had also had, say, three carriers at Hawaii ...
Isoroku Yamamoto
#28. The Pound is sinking, the Peso's failing, the Lira's reeling, and feeling quite appalling.
Paul McCartney
#29. Someone must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen to me to do so. The awful death roll called every week is appalling, not only because of the lives taken, the cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters.
William Wells Brown
#30. Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way. I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.
A.A. Milne
#31. If there is 'right to buy' for council tenants and housing association properties, then why shouldn't that apply to all tenants? Some landlords are decent, very caring people, but some of them are truly appalling.
Jeremy Corbyn
#32. As you can imagine I'm disappointed as anything that I was not selected to be the presidential running mate. And I find it continually appalling that it would be a radical thing to have a woman on the ticket.
Kate Clinton
#33. Speaking as a Christian, I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the apostle Peale appalling.
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#34. Beauty is not a hoax ... Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it (271).
Annie Dillard
#35. The appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the blue morning sea.
Herman Melville
#36. You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don't say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.
James Lovelock
#37. What the advertisers are trying to do by eliminating residuals is the most appalling form of greed that I cry thinking about it.
Diane Ladd
#38. We build but to tear down. Most of our work and resource is squandered. Our onward march is marked by devastation. Everywhere there is an appalling loss of time, effort and life. A cheerless view, but true.
Nikola Tesla
#39. What I find appalling is the intrusive nature towards my extended family.
Jeremy Corbyn
#40. To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?
Tom Stoppard
#41. There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.
Anne Truitt
#42. A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.
J.B. Priestley
#43. I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you.
Elizabeth McCracken
#44. I'm not saying that all politicians are awful. I don't know any of them well enough to say whether they're awful or not. But almost every day, you find out something about them that's appalling. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised any longer.
Peter Capaldi
#45. Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion!
I write to make people anxious and miserable and to
worsen their indigestion.
Wendy Cope
#46. Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.
Camille Paglia
#47. Death is appalling to those of the most iron nerves, when it comes quietly and in the stillness and solitude of night.
James F. Cooper
#48. The beast that was civilization ever faced forward, and in making its present world it devoured the world to come. It was an appalling truth that one's own children could be so callously sacrificed to immediate comforts, yet this was so and it had always been so.
Steven Erikson
#49. Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#50. We will have to repent, in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good,' King said,
Ken Follett
#51. I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was ... appalling ... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.
Laura Wade
#52. No one talked about the fact that in this year under the Obama administration you've seen the highest casualties in Afghanistan. And the fact that it took him almost 90 days to figure out what his strategy is going to be was absolutely appalling.
Allen West
#53. Macbeth's deed is done in horror, and without the faintest desire or sense of glory- done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand
A. C. Bradley
#54. This new thing about liking yourself, I find that absolutely appalling. Anyone who likes themselves, I just can't go too close to them. To me it's pure stupidity. But having some peace with yourself, that's quite a relief.
Carole Bouquet
#55. Why are we putting people who are already in a vulnerable position through this dreadful, appalling stress?
Jeremy Corbyn
#56. People are willing to do the most appalling things to another person for the sake of imposing a religious belief.
Karen Maitland
#57. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves in
which we survive will find its death and transfiguration only on the level of creation.
Albert Camus
#58. Her absence had felt like torture
almost a form of personal punishment. He had nobody to discuss his feelings with, and for the first time he realised with appalling clarity what a destructive hold she had over him.
Stieg Larsson
#59. Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.
Robert McChesney
#60. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism.
- Shaw's Preface
George Bernard Shaw
#61. The appalling details of the campaign of intimidation - which include grave-robbing - show the depths to which the animal extremists are prepared to stoop.
Tony Blair
#62. History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#63. By virtually any measure, the record of the Republican Majority is an appalling failure.
Sheila Jackson Lee
#64. The neglect this implied, the suffering and wasted quality of human life were appalling.
Fred Hollows
#65. My sweet, there are altogether too many respectable ladies in the world. The supply has far exceeded the demand. But there's an appalling shortage of attractive pirates, and you do seem to have a gift for plundering and ravishing. I think we've found your true calling.
Lisa Kleypas
#66. These irresponsible acts, which cannot have any justification whatsoever, are to be fully condemned. In these appalling circumstances, I want to offer you the most sincere condolences, both in my name and in that of the French people.
Jacques Chirac
#67. My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher.
Karen Joy Fowler
#68. It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#69. It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#70. It's appalling how much money raised at some charity events gets wasted on paying personnel and admin staff.
Jasmine Guinness
#71. When I want to render these fine nuances, I do not find them in the subject, but in the nature of women in real life who seek unhealthy emotions and are too stupid even to understand the horror in the most appalling situations.
Gustave Moreau
#72. The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time ... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Lawrence Durrell
#73. New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
Henry James
#74. The Murdoch-owned 'Sunday Times' has an appalling history of involvement in illegal activity. And it's because they're Sunday papers; they're trying to get scoops that the dailies haven't got.
Nick Davies
#75. As much as Jason hated the man, it was plain to see how Sloan had built the empire he had. Perseverance, dedication and hard work. Along with an appalling lack of ethics and a healthy does of gray magic.
Kristen Painter
#76. I'm so glad to be grouped with the men you've seen in rotten shape. My hope is that someday I will reach the pinnacle of that appalling list.
Ginn Hale
#77. Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.
George Bernard Shaw
#78. The IMF was a more formal and less fun place to work than Treasury. The meetings were endless, with crushing bureaucracy, an intrusive and fractious executive board, an appalling amount of paper, and a lot of factional conflict among various fiefdoms.
Timothy F. Geithner
#79. If you lose control of your debt and deficit, you get massive cuts in things such as health and education. You get appalling insecurity, jobs lost, firms going overseas.
David Cameron
#80. Carey was one of those appalling people who wake refreshed and ready for anything every morning about an hour before everyone else, and then bounce around whistling happily, avoiding death only because they move faster than the people who want to kill them.
P.F. Chisholm
#81. He darted a look at the uncovered basket behind me, saw what I was eating, and glared at me. "That's appalling," he said.
"They're wonderful!" I said. "They're all coming ripe."
"All the better to turn you into a tree," he said.
"I don't want to be a tree yet," I said.
Naomi Novik
#82. It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children.
Kurt Vonnegut
#83. There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.
John Connolly
#84. The wisdom to be on the throne of one's life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#85. What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.
Edward Dahlberg
#86. The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
#87. It's really actually been pretty shoddy and appalling, the amount of local content, Australian drama, on ABC TV.
Gillian Armstrong
#88. I wasn't concerned, but I was thinking that the fastest way to get your mind off him and on me would be to tell you something truly appalling about him.
Jodi Meadows
#89. TV drama - not always, but on the whole - were pretty appalling and very secondary, too. No one expected it to be like watching a movie; that was the point. But I think when you start watching 'Vikings,' it is like watching a movie - you're taken somewhere else.
Michael Hirst
#90. Beauty he loved for its own sake; ugliness, which more often than not was a form of inverted beauty, fascinated him. Life offered far too little of either, and far too much appalling mediocrity, which he thought hideous.
Lloyd Biggle Jr.
#91. What the diary does not reveal, for it stops too soon, is the appalling fact that from late 1945 until 1952 Japanese medical researchers were prohibited by U.S. occupation authorities from publishing scientific articles on the effects of the atomic bombs.
John W. Dower
#92. So how do magistrates understand the word civilization? Where do we stand with it? Justice reduced to subterfuge and trickery! The law to machinations! Appalling!
Victor Hugo
#93. I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
William Golding
#94. If he now failed, this world also would hereafter be redeemed. If he were not the ransom, another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion; perhaps-who knows-not even a second Incarnation ... some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility.
C.S. Lewis
#95. People with HIV are still stigmatized. The infection rates are going up. People are dying. The political response is appalling. The sadness of it, the waste.
Elton John
#96. On trade, our hypocrisy is at its most appalling. Trade reform isn't about charity, it's about justice, and this campaign, Trade Justice is an unstoppable idea.
Edward De Bono
#97. Because history is not the background - history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times!
Philip Roth
#98. There is probably no moment more appalling than that in which the tongue comes suddenly upon the ragged edge of a space from which the old familiar filling has disappeared.
Robert Benchley
#99. We convince ourselves that even our shameless waste, our unchecked consumption and our appalling ignorance of anyplace in the world except our own little corner must continue
or they win! No, when you become smarter and less gluttonous, you win. We all win!
Bill Maher
#100. There's a strange lack of knowledge about the role of drag queens in our culture. I attribute this to the appalling state of our country's education system. Others might blame an utter lack of interest. Who am I to judge?
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
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