Top 100 Odious Quotes
#1. I like playing Vernon Dursley in 'Harry Potter,' because that gives me a license to be horrible to kids. I hate the odious business of sucking up to the public.
Richard Griffiths
#2. A civil ruler dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a clergyman dabbling in politics. Both render themselves odious as well as ridiculous.
James Gibbons
#3. The Roman government appeared every day less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects.
Edward Gibbon
#4. Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
Nick Harkaway
#5. Avoid outshining the master. All superiority is odious, but the superiority of a subject over his prince is not only stupid, it is fatal. This is a lesson that the stars in the sky teach us - they may be related to the sun, and just as brilliant, but they never appear in her company.
Baltasar Gracian
#6. After puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious ... Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late.
Antonio Gramsci
#7. Then she was terribly angry, and took him up and threw him with all her might against the wall. "Now, thou wilt be quiet, odious frog," said she.
Jacob Grimm
#8. Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.
Harlan Stone
#9. Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off them.
Mark Twain
#10. The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it's translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#11. Kindness acts Not always as you think; a hated hand Renders it odious.
Pierre Corneille
#12. When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.
Theodore Dreiser
#13. Whenever I read _Time_ or _Newsweek_ or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?
Edward Abbey
#14. You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
Emile M. Cioran
#15. All over the U.S. there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.
Simon Hoggart
#16. What bitter slavishness, that of my face, that of one of my former faces. This odious fate reserved for my features must perforce make me odious too, but I no longer care.
Jorge Luis Borges
#17. But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.
Virginia Woolf
#18. Since time immemorial wise people have been saying that all comparisons are odious. When we compare, we set up a winner-loser dynamic. If my crisis is greater than yours, then yours is belittled and insignificant. I say that's nonsense. Each crisis has its own power, its own unique reality.
Tavis Smiley
#19. Why do guys insist on wearing those odious jeans with their rear ends hanging down around their ankles? Do they really think it's hot?
Steve Kluger
#20. The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.
Robert H. Jackson
#21. Best masters for the young writer and speaker are the fault- finding brothers and sisters at home who will not spare him, but willpick and cavil, and tell the odious truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. No, they'll dance with you and then say I am justly called mysterious," he said.
"You are odious."
"Quite so, but admit you've never danced better than these last few moments when you were too angry to think about it.
Caroline Stevermer
#23. Gospel repentance is not a little hanging down of the head. It's a working of the heart until your sin becomes more odious to you than any punishment for it.
Richard Sibbes
#24. One is not, my dear sir, a superior man merely because one sees the world in an odious light. One only hates mankind and life itself through failing to look deeply enough.
Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand
#25. I hate the present modes of living and getting a living. Farming and shopkeeping and working at a trade or profession are all odious to me. I should relish getting my living in a simple, primitive fashion.
Henry David Thoreau
#26. She was like a musician who may be an odious vulgarian in ordinary life, devoid of tact and taste; but who will hear a false note in music with diabolical accuracy of judgment.
Anonymous
#27. A few persons of an odious and despised country could not have filled the world with believers, had they not shown undoubted credentials from the divine person who sent them on such a message.
Joseph Addison
#28. In other words, the uninsured private bankers had to be bailed out illegally and utterly unethically. But the taxpayers who were forced to carry that can should not even be given better terms for repaying the odious, private debt they were forced to acquire in order to bail the bankers out.
Yanis Varoufakis
#29. Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.
Richard Steele
#30. Jackson went from the professor's chair to the officer's saddle. He carried with him the very elements of character which made him odious as a teacher; but I never saw him in an arbitrary mood.
Daniel H. Hill
#31. To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
Virginia Woolf
#32. I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.
Walter Savage Landor
#33. I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.
Dylan Thomas
#34. Oh, the odious wench.How I wish I were rid of her. I have always loathed women, from clew to earring; hook, line and sinker; root and branch.I always said this would happen, you remember; I was against it from the start. Damn it for a flibbertigibbet, the hussy.
Patrick O'Brian
#35. Opposite to godliness is atheism in profession, and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind, that it never had many professors.
Isaac Newton
#36. There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world's most beautiful music. My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward he makes me read to him from the Bible.
Sofia Samatar
#38. A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
Honore De Balzac
#39. Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.
Christopher Marlowe
#40. We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it.
Yishan Wong
#42. The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious.
William E. Gladstone
#43. I look at him.
"It's odious," he says.
"Detention?" I ask, confused.
"Huh?"
We have no idea what the other is talking about.
"What's odious?" I ask.
"O.D.S," he says, pointing to his discman and obviously referring to some dropkick band.
Like I really care.
Melina Marchetta
#44. Flattery labors under the odious charge of servility.
Tacitus
#45. What a night, I'm telling you. Odious. Odious with cherries on top.
Victor Lodato
#46. The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#47. Underwriting, an odious but not illegal practice. When a claim
John Grisham
#48. Though fraud in all other actions be odious, yet in matters of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes his enemies by stratagem is as much to be praised as he who overcomes them by force.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#49. Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers feelings.
Richard Stallman
#50. There are odious virtues; such as inflexible severity, and an integrity that accepts of no favor.
Tacitus
#51. It had been supposed, until our time, that despotism was odious, under whatever form it appeared. But it is a discovery of modern days that there are such things as legitimate tyranny and holy injustice, provided they are exercised in the name of the people.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#52. To subject every private family to the odious visits and examination of the tax-gatherers ... would be altogether inconsistent with liberty.
Adam Smith
#53. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.
Thomas Jefferson
#54. Oh, there you are, you odious little prawn...
Alan Bradley
#55. Nothing is more odious than music without hidden meaning.
Frederic Chopin
#56. Forever all goodness will be most charming; forever all wickedness will be most odious.
Thomas Sprat
#57. What is the good of life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labor shall be itself a joy.
Edward Carpenter
#58. Vicious habits are so great a stain to human nature, and so odious in themselves, that every person actuated by right reason would avoid them, though he were sure they would be always concealed both from God and man, and had no future punishment entailed upon them.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#59. See Time has touched me gently in his race,
And left no odious furrows in my face.
George Crabbe
#60. A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.
Norton Juster
#61. None of us are nuclear experts, but we know that if there is a melt-down and breach of containment, that's clearly the most odious thing that could happen.
William Scranton
#62. The odious little dogs that French people seemed to like so much rushed out at him as he rode by, barking furiously.
Paul Bowles
#64. Comparisons are odious
Cervantes, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, ect...
Talon Rihai
#65. An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.
Charles Maurice De Talleyrand
#66. I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as 'superior' to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone - as I have always walked alone.
Edith Sitwell
#67. We are told that this is an odious and unpopular tax. I never knew a tax that was not odious and unpopular with the people who paid it.
John Sherman
#68. It is a trite but true Observation, that Examples work more forcibly on the Mind than Precepts: and if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praiseworthy.
Henry Fielding
#69. Peter Mandelson is one of the most odious, self-satisfied, misogynistic men I have ever met. Compellingly, fascinatingly horrible.
Jemima Khan
#70. 'I shall vomit,' said Hugh, 'if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.'
Vladimir Nabokov
#71. A big part of the problem that we face today is that our children have been taught at schools that every idea is right, that no one should criticize others' positions, no matter how odious.
Ed Royce
#72. I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
Jonathan Swift
#73. It's always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.
Russell Baker
#75. The U.S. invaded the wrong country, destroying an odious government that was not responsible for 9/11. I don't know how you recover from invading the wrong country, no matter how you spin it.
Richard Engel
#77. The exercise of authority is odious, and they who know how to govern, leave it in abeyance as much as possible.
John Lancaster Spalding
#78. I mistake the American people if they favor the odious doctrine that there is no such thing as international morality; that there is one law for a strong nation and another for a weak one.
Grover Cleveland
#79. Vicious habits are so odious and degrading that they transform the individual who practices them into an incarnate demon.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#80. Punishment is now unfashionable ... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.
Thomas Szasz
#81. What makes tar sands particularly odious is that the energy you get out in the end, per unit carbon dioxide, is poor. It's equivalent to burning coal in your automobile.
James Hansen
#82. His eyes widen. Then he laughs. "Elissa isn't my girlfriend. Jesus, that's disgusting. She's my sister." It's my turn to be surprised. "Your sister?" "Yes." Relief has never felt more odious.
Leisa Rayven
#83. There is something very unnatural and odious in a government a thousand leagues off. A whole government of our own choice, managed by persons whom we love, revere, and can confide in, has charms in it for which men will fight.
John Adams
#84. There is still another inconvenieney in conquests made by democracies; their government is ever odious to the conquered states. It is apparently monarchical, but in reality it is more oppressive than monarchy, as the experience of all ages and countries evinces.
Baron De Montesquieu
#85. You told a lie, an odious damned lie; Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie.
William Shakespeare
#87. Nothing is more odious than the majority, for it consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating scoundrels and submissive weaklings, and a mass of men who trot after them without thinking, or knowing their own minds.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#88. But camels, though odious to view and endowed with the offensive spirit, did not enjoy the blessing of pachydermaty.
F. E. Adcock
#89. But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
George Eliot
#90. She constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die.
Gustave Flaubert
#91. We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs ... of our barbarous ancestors.
Guy De Maupassant
#92. The day seems long, but night is odious; no sleep, but dreams; no dreams but visions strange.
Philip Sidney
#93. My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.
Frank Miller
#94. Few practices are as odious as commenting-out code. Don't do this!
Robert C. Martin
#95. Is it possible your pragmatical worship should not know that the comparisons made between wit and wit, courage and courage, beauty and beauty, birth and birth, are always odious and ill taken?.
Miguel De Cervantes
#96. But I think I can sincerely declare that I cheerfully submit myself to every odious name for conscience' sake; and from my soul I despise all those whose guilt, malice, or folly has made them my foes.
James Otis
#97. MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so - because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious.
Mark Twain
#98. The slave-breeders and slave-traders, are a small, odious and detested class, among you; and yet in politics, they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters, as you are the master of your own negroes.
Abraham Lincoln
#99. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind her, and to whom she is grateful.
George Eliot
#100. You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host.
Ilana Mercer
