Top 100 Quotes About Contempt
#1. No man who worships education has got the best out of education ... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
G.K. Chesterton
#2. He belongs to that fraction of humanity which for centuries has made other fractions the objects of contempt and exploitation, then, when it saw the handwriting on the wall, set about to give them back their humanity.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
#3. Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride,
Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,
Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
Which he has never used; that thought with him
Is in its infancy ...
William Wordsworth
#4. Here, brother, contempt is no use, even if he does despise Grushenka. He may despise her, but he still can't tear himself away from her.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#5. He was arguably the best-qualified FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover; he thought Clinton was the most talented politician since Richard Nixon. That made their mutual contempt all the more tragic. It undermined the FBI and ultimately damaged the United States.
Tim Weiner
#6. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
Marilynne Robinson
#7. Gobbledygook may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one's clients, or more probably a mixture of both. A system that can't or won't communicate is not a safe basis for a democracy.
Michael Shanks
#8. Where nature is concerned, familiarity breeds love and knowledge, not contempt.
Stewart Udall
#9. Crime is contagious ... if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
Louis D. Brandeis
#10. If the choice is given to us of liberty or security, we must scorn the latter with the proper contempt of free man and the sound judgment of wise men who know that liberty and security are not incompatible in the lives of honest men.
James Farley
#11. Until it had been clearly explained that men were always and always partly wrong in all their ideas, life would be full of poison and secret bitterness. Men fight about their philosophies and religions, there is no certainty in them; but their contempt for women is flawless and unanimous.
Dorothy Richardson
#12. Your sister is the only creature on earth who shares your heritage, history, environment, DNA, bone structure, and contempt for stupid Aunt Gertie.
Linda Sunshine
#13. Isn't it fitting that so many of those who have contempt for the private sector will soon find themselves back in it?
Mitt Romney
#14. I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us, and yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects.
Emma Lazarus
#15. Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous.
Joanne Harris
#16. Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
Czeslaw Milosz
#17. I think when it comes to women who write or who fancy ourselves 'hip downtown literati', there is a certain contempt for being overly sexual or really looking for boyfriends. We tend to be marginalized as some 'Sex & The City' Carrie Bradshaw chick-lit dummies who just want shoes and a ring.
Julie Klausner
#18. A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.
John Steinbeck
#19. Readers have the power that professors pretend they wield. Millions of words of professorial contempt have failed to kill Kipling. Praising Shaw to the skies has been vain.
Gene Wolfe
#21. I couldn't be sufficiently interested in human beings to be a writer if I had contempt for human beings.
Nadine Gordimer
#22. Anger and hate against one we love steels our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#23. The common theme here was contempt: a poisonous disregard for human life. For Vladimir Putin's critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead.
Luke Harding
#24. Style, after all, is a kind of humor,
Something truly beneath contempt...
Larry Levis
#25. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. His friends he loved. His direst earthly foe - Cats-I believe he did but feign to hate. My hand will miss the insinuated nose, Mine eyes the tail that wagged contempt at Fate.
William Watson
#27. I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.
Colin Wilson
#28. College stirred in her a certain contempt for virtues like kindness and persistence. She would have appeared to have been a kind and persistent person herself, but a steady diet of Antonioni films and an introductory course on existentialism had awakened her to the fact that she wanted more.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#29. Transcendence is realising that people do not deserve pity or love or compassion. People deserve contempt.
Christos Tsiolkas
#30. There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#31. [Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts.
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#32. It's times like this I am glad I don't look people in the eye. If I did, surely they would die on the spot from the contempt shooting out of mine.
Jodi Picoult
#33. Avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#34. The God of hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A god who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved; cursed, not worshipped. A heaven presided over by such a god must be below the meanest hell.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#35. Do not instigate or treat any of your employees, working at your place, with contempt. Treat everyone with respect. You never know what benefit a person will bring.
Dada Bhagwan
#36. Although Salinger had long since cut me out of his life completely and made it plain that he had nothing but contempt for me, the thought of becoming the object of his wrath was more than I felt ready to take on.
Joyce Maynard
#37. If you will not have it thus: if in the pride of power, if in contempt of reason and reliance upon force, you say we shall not go, but shall remain as subjects to you, then, gentlemen of the North, a war is to be inaugurated the like of which men have not seen ...
Jefferson Davis
#38. The pride of young men requires that they seem wise, despite their inexperience, and the only way to appear all-knowing without going to the tedium of acquiring knowledge, is to hold all knowledge in weary-seeming contempt.
John C. Wright
#39. It's very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.
Harold Pinter
#40. As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.
Neil MacGregor
#41. My job consists of basically masking my contempt for the assholes in charge, and, at least once a day, retiring to the men's room so I can jerk off while I fantasize about a life that doesn't so closely resemble Hell.
Kevin Spacey
#42. Practice the vocabulary of love - unlearn the language of hate and contempt.
Sathya Sai Baba
#43. Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.
Nicolaus Copernicus
#44. What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.
Joseph Priestley
#45. Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.
Margaret Atwood
#46. Christ saw much in this world to weep over, and much to pray over; but He saw nothing in it to look upon with contempt.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#47. Omissions are sins, and must come into judgment, and particularly the contempt and neglect of the seals of the covenant;
Matthew Henry
#48. Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
William Shakespeare
#49. Where oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt?
C.S. Lewis
#50. Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.
Samuel Johnson
#51. In our proud love affair with ourselves we pour contempt, whether we know it or not, on the worth of God's glory. As our pride pours contempt upon God's glory, His righteousness obliges Him to pour wrath upon our pride.
John Piper
#52. The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.
William Osler
#53. One of the most depressing features of the ethical side of the matter is that instead of such methods arousing contempt they are more or less openly admired. And this is logical. Canonise 'business success,' and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!
Ida Tarbell
#54. I'm screwed up
I'm so full of contempt for everyone and everything. I mean, sure, I like lots of things but ... I don't know. I've just become too goddamn judgmental!
Seth
#55. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#56. Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the
government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it
invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
Louis D. Brandeis
#57. I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
Jane Austen
#58. Our world was brutal, immoral, smug and conventional. We had unbounded contempt for all those who did not sin as we sinned.
Jim Tully
#59. The love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.
Edward Gibbon
#60. Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.
Marisha Pessl
#62. Contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.
Richard M. Weaver
#63. Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution.
Samuel Johnson
#64. MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.
Ambrose Bierce
#65. Teens had the world's best built-in poker face: a hormone-fueled, constant glare of bored contempt.
Barry Lyga
#66. JUDGE: Are you trying to show contempt for this court?
MAE WEST: I was doin' my best to hide it.
Mae West
#67. God has given to man no sharper spur to victory than contempt of death.
Hannibal
#68. Two loves have made two different cities: self-love hath made a terrestrial city, which rises in contempt of God; and Divine Love hath made a celestial one, which rises in contempt of self. The former glories in itself - the latter in God.
Saint Augustine
#69. I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.
Coretta Scott King
#70. Thus men of more enlighten'd genius and more intrepid spirit must compose themselves to the risque of public censure, and the contempt of their jealous contemporaries, in order to lead ignorant and prejudic'd minds into more happy and successful methods.
Jon Jones
#71. The contempt of money is no more a virtue than to wash one's hand is one; but one does not willingly shake hands with a man that never washes his.
Horace Walpole
#72. Your flattery is as full of contempt as your insults were.
Mason Cooley
#73. So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
Victor Hugo
#74. The entire second-period sophomore girls' PE class thought my balls were uniquely and supremely beneath contempt. Great.
Frank Portman
#75. The world doesn't really have much respect for Christians who adopt its fashions and ideas. It is inclined to regard them with contempt - to write them off either as cowards who are ashamed of their faith or as frauds whose profession is not sincere.
Billy Graham
#77. The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.
Lester Bangs
#78. Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#79. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
G.K. Chesterton
#80. Love is a fleeting emotion, to reach true nirvana one must know themselves and forsake love, for it breeds contempt.
Gautama Buddha
#81. There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Herbert Spencer
#82. Natural beauty and wonder are priceless heirlooms which God has bestowed upon our nation. How shall we escape the contempt of the coming generation if we suffer this irreplaceable heritage to be wasted?
Henry Van Dyke
#83. There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.
Alice Munro
#84. Spirituality authors, who are generally forgiving of most human foibles ... take a hard line on intellectualism ... Skepticism they view with contempt, as the refuge of the unenlightened.
Wendy Kaminer
#85. These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.
Martin Amis
#86. Of late years, however, since his children were growing up, he had begun to value respectability, and had had himself made a magistrate; a position for which he was admirably fitted, because of his strong conservatism and his contempt for foreigners.
Upton Sinclair
#87. Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.
James David Barber
#88. [T]he blossom of benevolence, of charity, is the fairest flower, no matter whether it blooms by the side of a hovel, or bursts from a vine climbing the marble pillar of a palace. I respect no man because he is rich; I hold in contempt no man because he is poor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#89. A rich rogue nowadays is fit company for any gentleman; and the world, my dear, hath not such a contempt for roguery as you imagine.
John Gay
#90. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
Paul Lafargue
#91. There are days when I am haunted by a feeling that is blacker than the blackest melancholy. I have a contempt for humanity. I despise the people I have been fated to call my contemporaries. I feel suffocated by their filthy breath.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#92. It is easier to compare oneself, to establish social exchange as that swapmeet of glory and contempt where each person receives a superiority in exchange for the inferiority he confesses to.
Jacques Ranciere
#93. It is possible to indulge too great contempt for mere success, which is frequently attended with all the practical advantages of merit itself, and with several advantages that merit alone can never command.
William Benton Clulow
#94. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.
Ashley Montagu
#95. My worst boss was a departmental chair who never learned to appreciate new developments in the field. He had contempt for students and younger researchers, and he saw the job of running the department as a nuisance.
Steven Pinker
#96. A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#97. The end of despots is always odd?exhilarating to those who suffered their tyrannies, and to those who hold despotism in contempt, and anti-climatic at the same time, the discovery that these tyrants were petty, frightened men after all.
Fouad Ajami
#98. If you would have a boy to despise his mother, let her keep him at home, and spend her life in petting him up, and slaving to indulge his follies and caprices.
Anne Bronte
