Quotes About Condescension

#1. Then turn your eyes back on me,
and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects.

V.C. Andrews

#2. The defining characteristic of a hipster - the thing everyone agreed on, and most hated about them - wasn't so much their taste, but their contempt and condescension toward those less cool than themselves.

Mara Wilson

#3. Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.

Cornel West

#4. There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

Peter Shaffer

#5. Of what use is it to be tolerant of others if you are convinced that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong? That isn't tolerance but condescension.

Anthony De Mello

#6. I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension - the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds.

Mark Van Doren

#7. If your church conveys that spirit of condescension or judgment, it's likely not a place where grace is on tap.

Philip Yancey

#8. Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.

Steve Erickson

#9. Well, that settles it," Jason said with mock severity. "Such condescension tells me what I had long suspected."
"Which is . . ."
"That George Bambridge was not raised with the benefit of a sister.

Kate Noble

#10. Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.

Nancy Kress

#11. This does not mean that I fail to recognise that Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension. It just means that I have no idea how, or indeed if, Lisp handles exceptions.

Verity Stob

#12. I'd developed a style in dealing with foreigners that won their trust quickly. That style was two parts showman, two parts flatterer, and one part philanderer, combined with a hint of mischief, a sniff of condescension, and a pinch of contempt.

Gregory David Roberts

#13. With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

Adrian McKinty

#14. Perhaps there are somewhere in the infinite universe beings whose minds outrank our minds to the same extent as our minds surpass those of the insects. Perhaps there will once somewhere live beings who will look upon us with the same condescension as we look upon amoebae.

Ludwig Von Mises

#15. Eucharistic worship is not so much worship of the inaccessible transcendence as worship of the divine condescension, and it is also the merciful and redeeming transformation of the world in the human heart

Pope John Paul II

#16. If I needed your condescension, I'd ask for it.

Mark Slouka

#17. The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life but by some voluntary condescension on God's part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.

Various

#18. There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.

Edward Hoagland

#19. I would not preach tolerance, which seems to me another name for condescension and presupposes faults in those to be tolerated ... Nor do I believe in demanding love - that should be the gift of a free will. But simply to be kind - that is not too much to ask of any of us.

Josephine Lawrence

#20. There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.

Joseph Campbell

#21. When I started out, there were three things that made film people look at me with condescension, I was young, I was black, and I was female. I have won a certain respect, but I think the film community still sees directing as a male job.

Euzhan Palcy

#22. Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension.

Verity Stob

#23. The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim.

Lord Chesterfield

#24. We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us ... but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?

J.G. Farrell

#25. Of all insults, the temporary condescension of a master to a slave is the most outrageous and galling. That potentate who most condescends, mark him well; for that potentate, if occasion come, will prove your uttermost tyrant.

Herman Melville

#26. No judgment, no condescension. Just hope.

James Frey

#27. Service, which is nothing other than a modern echo of noblesse oblige, and generally undertaken in the same spirit of benign condescension.

William Deresiewicz

#28. The only people who soul can truly magnify the Lord are ... people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God.

John Piper

#29. We must not look at the past with the enormous condescension of posterity.

E.P. Thompson

#30. Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days

Elias Canetti

#31. No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.

David Foster Wallace

#32. We certainly would be happy for more help, but not at the price of condescension and arrogance. If the Europeans believe they can afford to be less committed in Somalia, please - we can deal with it ourselves.

Yoweri Museveni

#33. Tolerance is most decidedly not the equal of respect. It pales in comparison. In inter-personal relationships, tolerance as the basis of attitude and conduct is insulting, belittling and offensive. It smacks of condescension.

Keat Peng Goh

#34. We are so little, that if God should manifest His greatness without condescension, we should be trampled under His feet; but God, who must stoop to view the skies, and bow to see what angels do, turns His eye yet lower, and looks to the lowly and contrite, and makes them great.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#35. I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

Sherman Alexie

#36. Superiority makes every man feel its equal. It is courtesy without condescension; affability without familiarity; self-sufficiency without selfishness; simplicity without snide. It weighs sixteen ounces to the pound without the package, and it doesn't need a four-colored label to make it go.

George Horace Lorimer

#37. And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

Steven Pinker

#38. It means eating your words, this thing of refusing to be a fence-sitter, but I'd rather eat my words than get calluses from sitting.
No one who has not experienced the condescension of a buyer toward an ordinary salesgirl can have any conception of its withering effect.

Mary Barnett Gilson

#39. We often hear that people mean well: that so many just don't how to interact with people with disabilities. They're unsure of the 'right' reaction, so they default to condescension that makes them feel better in the face of their discomfort.

Stella Young

#40. As proof that HOW we see things matters, Gen. Montgomery took a preprepared text that had been deemed an innocuous complement to his American troops and delivered it in such a way that his condescension prompted more division than unity.

Jean Edward Smith

#41. Take your condescension, your unwanted advice, your creepy lurking outside of my door and shove it up your ass.

Erin Watt

#42. A preoccupation with theory has been a defensive response by academic biographers in this country, I submit, to the condescension of traditional humanists and social scientists pervading higher education for many years.

David Levering Lewis

#43. For some people, 'erudition' is nothing more than a vehicle for hostility and arrogance; 'good taste' merely an excuse for condescension--or worse, censorship -- Sadie

Alice Kimberly

#44. His tone dripping condescension, Lothaire crooned, "Ah children, it's not yet story time." He closed his eyes and turned away, saying over his shoulder, "To anyone who contemplates even nearing me while I sleep: I will garrote you with your own viscera.

Kresley Cole

#45. One who strictly prosecutes the misdemeanors of others will find not condescension towards his own.

Saint John Chrysostom

#46. Obama's style of argumentation is unlike any president I have ever met, and I've met a lot of them. And the condescension that oozes from him when he's talking about his opponents, it's really striking.

Paul Gigot

#47. Back home, this Catholic kid was accustomed to a Protestant culture's condescension, but here he could see for himself the world-historic glories of Catholicism ... [A Catholic American soldier's reaction to seeing St. Peter's Basilica during WWII.]

James Carroll

#48. Poets are regarded as handicapped writers whose work must be treated with a tender condescension, such as one accords the athletic achievements of basketball players confined to wheelchairs.

Thomas M. Disch

#49. Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.

Phillips Brooks

#50. ...a gallon of condescension, upon everybody...

Charles Dickens

#51. I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful condescension of industrial masters. Guardians have no place in a land of freemen.

Woodrow Wilson

#52. His posture spoke of condescension, his expression disinterest. He was all brambles and icicles as he strode closer to her cage.

Marissa Meyer

#53. What counts now are the value-less facts, the material and the rational. All else is regarded with condescension as being of only sentimental value.

Jean Gebser

#54. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle.

Mark Steyn

#55. A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.

Patty Smith

#56. There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#57. We are a society that treats people with disabilities with condescension and pity, not dignity and respect.

Stella Young

#58. We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools, and by open, hearty behavior, show, condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel.

Adam Weishaupt

#59. There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

John Steinbeck

#60. Asking for help with shame says:
You have the power over me.
Asking with condescension says:
I have the power over you.
But asking for help with gratitude says:
We have the power to help each other.

Amanda Palmer

#61. Over all the millennia, only you have ever loved me, Thor. Only you have ever looked at me with affection in place of condescension. Why, then, am I killing you, and not the others? Because you stopped.

Robert Rodi

#62. Take advantage of the gracious condescension of the elegant calf's kidney, multiply its metamorphoses: you can without giving it any offence, call it the chameleon of cuisine.

Emmanuel Des Essarts

#63. The praise of free men is worth having, for it is the only praise which is free from either servility or condescension.

Bernard Crick

#64. The enormous condescension of posterity was the magnificent phrase employed by E. P. Thompson to remind us that we must never belittle the past popular struggles and victories (as well as defeats) that we are inclined to take for granted.

Christopher Hitchens

#65. That was a tall order for Ivy. Sarcasm was kind of her native tongue, though she was fluent in "stern disappointment" and "light condescension" as well. She was also a good friend. Well, imaginary friend.

Brandon Sanderson

#66. All Nigerians must learn from Christ and be determined to imbibe the lesson of divine condescension.

Peter Akinola

#67. There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#68. What are others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being?

Graham Greene

#69. Professors stare down from their podiums; that's their insecurity.

Marty Rubin

#70. It is most remarkable that Lincoln, when he saw so much that was vulnerable in the leadership of the Church, did not move to the opposite error and become a scoffer.

Elton Trueblood

#71. ...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.

Rebecca Solnit

#72. People talk to old people like they're children.'Oh you're very old aren't you?' Yeah I'm old. I'm not stupid.

Craig Ferguson

#73. Do you imagine that the poisonous spittle of five hundred little men of your sort, hoisted on to each other's shoulders, could even drool down on to the tips of my august toes?

Marcel Proust

#74. It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation.

Catherynne M Valente

#75. When you choose to look down on something, you render yourself incapable of understanding it.

Stewart Stafford

#76. You can coat that shit in sugar, but it's still shit.

Kyran Pittman

#77. The intellect, like all cultural values, has created an aristocracy based on the possession of rational culture and independent of all personal ethical qualities of man. The aristocracy of intellect is hence an unbrotherly aristocracy.

Max Weber