Top 100 Quotes About Pernicious
#1. The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.
Aldous Huxley
#2. We see the pernicious effects of luxury in the ancient Romans, who immediately found themselves poor as soon as this vice got footing among them.
Joseph Addison
#3. Theological error is the most pernicious of errors; it strikes at man's center and separates him from his Creator and Redeemer. God insisted not only that Israelites should judge their own hearts and cast aside falsehood about Him but that they should also confront it wherever it emerged.
Max Anders
#4. In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Read more at
Leo Tolstoy
#5. There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.
Joseph Addison
#6. Cancer is the most pernicious, insidious, disgusting disease of life.
Pierce Brosnan
#7. So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.
Sol Luckman
#8. The days of the Cross are counted. We must deliver the German nation from the pernicious influence of Christianity.
Erich Ludendorff
#9. The presence of anti-IF antibodies is highly specific for pernicious anemia.
Terry Mahan Buttaro
#10. The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.
Edward Dahlberg
#11. A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.
Shirley Hazzard
#12. We are fully justified in valuing the life and person of an intended victim more highly than the life of a pernicious assailant. The attacker must be stopped. At once and completely.
Jeff Cooper
#13. There is, however, one other human right which is infrequently mentioned but which seems to be destined to become very important: this is the right, or the duty, of the individual to abstain from cooperating in activities which he considers wrong or pernicious.
Albert Einstein
#14. In his middle life, at about the time such things were known about, it was discovered that, he had pernicious anemia. It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.
John Steinbeck
#15. A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace.
Pascal Mercier
#17. You see, as I go along, I've come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can't get rid of it.
James Jones
#18. [H]e could feel his unshakable enemy, depression, blooming in him like a pernicious flower that could never quite be ripped out.
Andrea Speed
#19. Lust is an immoderate wantonness of the flesh, a sweet poison, a cruel pestilence; a pernicious poison, which weakeneth the body of man, and effeminateth the strength of the heroic mind.
Francis Quarles
#20. Often, it was only the bold, fearless, risky action that had any hope of circumventing impending doom, as if Fate was amused by the colorfully unexpected, and while she was laughing, one might slip changes past the pernicious bitch.
Karen Marie Moning
#21. the women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against "honor" killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communities to control the behavior of women and girls.
Geraldine Brooks
#22. The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don't just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.
Steven Pressfield
#23. The masses are crude, lame, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them but to drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.
Emma Goldman
#24. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.
Joseph Conrad
#25. No maxim can be more pernicious than that which would teach us to consult the temper of the times, and to tell only so much as we imagine our contemporaries will be able to bear.
William Godwin
#26. Far from me be the gift of Bacchus
pernicious, inflaming wine, that weakens both body and mind.
Homer
#27. The socially pernicious, racially wasteful, and soul-withering consequences of the working of mothers outside the home must cease. And this can only come to pass, either through the programme of institutional upbringing, or through the intimate renaissance of the home.
Ellen Key
#28. Once slavery in America was not seen as radical. It became, instead, a revolutionary idea that slaves should be freed. When we have lived under a pernicious power long enough, no matter how oppressive, we grow so accustomed to the yoke that its removal seems frightening, even wrong.
Gerry Spence
#29. This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam - especially the pernicious meme "Islamophobia," by which anyone who thinks Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot.
Sam Harris
#30. Freedom of belief is pernicious, it is nothing but the freedom to be wrong.
Robert Bellarmine
#32. Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.
Irving Kristol
#33. Half-truths can be more pernicious than outright falsehoods.
Wendy Lesser
#34. The most damnable and pernicious heresy that has ever plagued the mind of man was the idea that somehow he could make himself good enough to deserve to live with an all-holy God.
Martin Luther
#35. I feel all those human beings to be pernicious who can no longer oppose what they love: they thereby ruin the best things and people.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#36. But you know, as I do, that the storm will pass
And that the implacable sun doesn't simply stop
When obscured by a dark, pernicious cloud,
Which is why I know I'll return to your house-
On a Sunday that's there on the calendar-
And laugh with you over a glass of grappa.
Mauricio Rosencof
#37. Any innovation in matters of faith is extremely pernicious and utterly damnable!
John Eudes
#38. Religion, charity, pure benevolence, and morals, mingled up with superstitious rites and ferocious cruelty, form in their combination institutions the most powerful and the most pernicious that have ever afflicted mankind.
John Quincy Adams
#39. Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
John Updike
#40. It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.
Anita Sarkeesian
#41. Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.
Tom Holland
#42. In fact, some have said that the clash between Catholicism and Protestantism illustrates the old maxim that religious freedom is the product of two equally pernicious fanaticisms, each cancelling the other out
Fareed Zakaria
#43. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.
Emma Goldman
#45. The necessity of a senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies, to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders, into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.
James Madison
#46. The love of popularity seems little else than the love of being beloved; and is only blamable when a person aims at the affections of a people by means in appearance honest, but in their end pernicious and destructive.
William Shenstone
#47. The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue.
Walter Savage Landor
#48. sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life.
George Eliot
#50. As for the possibility of 'having it all,' career and family with no sacrifice to either, that is a myth we would do well to abandon, together with the pernicious notion that a woman who chooses one of the other is somehow deficient.
Sonia Sotomayor
#51. Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation on Thursday, leaves a dismal legacy at the Justice Department, but one of his legal innovations was especially pernicious: the demonizing of state attempts to ensure honest elections.
Edwin Meese
#52. I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.
Camille Paglia
#53. Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.
Andre Gide
#54. Creationism, perhaps the most pernicious of the intellectual perversions now afflicting the American public.
Arthur C. Clarke
#55. Adulthood brings with it a pernicious illusion of control.
Juan Gabriel
#56. The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.
Robert Henri
#57. How dangerous it is for our salvation, how unworthy of God and of ourselves, how pernicious even for the peace of our hearts, to want always to stay where we are! Our whole life was only given us to advance us by great strides toward our heavenly country.
Francois Fenelon
#58. Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#59. The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion.
Gareth J. Nelson
#60. Religion is ... the most pernicious single influence in human society, without one redeeming feature.
Theodore Schroeder
#61. I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.
Robert A. Heinlein
#62. What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#63. The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.
Ludwig Von Mises
#64. The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts
Bertrand Russell
#65. To say that everything in the bible is to be believed , simply because it is found in that volume, is equally absurd and pernicious ... To discard a portion of scripture is not necessarily to reject the truth, but may be the highest evidence that one can give of his love of truth.
William Lloyd Garrison
#66. But a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men!
John Calvin
#67. More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.
Benjamin Disraeli
#68. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.
Stephen King
#69. There is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.
Mary Parker Follett
#70. This, to a busy mind like his, was a truly deplorable situation; and had he not been a man of inflexible morals and regular habits, there would have been great danger of his taking to politics or drinking - both which pernicious vices we daily see men driven to by mere spleen and idleness.
Washington Irving
#71. More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible - the tyranny of a majority.
Emma Goldman
#72. To prohibit what they think pernicious, is not claiming exemption from error, but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of acting on their conscientious conviction.
John Stuart Mill
#73. Three things too much, and three too little are pernicious to man; to speak much, and know little; to spend much, and have little; to presume much, and be worth little.
Miguel De Cervantes
#74. Those who need a champion cannot afford compromise, in the face of forces that are powerful, persistent and pernicious and greedy.
Elizabeth Edwards
#75. I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.
Roger Brooke Taney
#77. Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid them.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#78. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom
#79. Of all the ingenious mistakes into which erring man has fallen, perhaps none have been so pernicious in their consequences, or have brought so many evils into the world, as the popular opinion that the way of the transgressor is pleasant and easy.
Hosea Ballou
#80. All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.
Alexander Herzen
#81. The achievements of certain disadvantaged groups (Jews, say) and the continued struggles of others (for instance, blacks) led to pernicious assumptions about the stuff each group was made of. Those who found a way to emerge from the ghetto were said to possess the correct cultural values.
Anonymous
#82. I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual and moral cowards.
William Borah
#83. 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
#84. The passionate desire to conclude is one of humanity's most pernicious and sterile manias.
Flaubert
#85. State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.
Noam Chomsky
#86. Nationality was the most pernicious, depersonalizing, homogenizing label that could ever be attached to the human individual.
Rolf Hochhuth
#87. Love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.
Stephen King
#88. That a rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive.
David Hume
#89. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Bertrand Russell
#90. Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#91. One inconvenience ... may attend bold and arduous attempts: frequent failure may discourage. This evil, however, is not more pernicious than the slow proficiency which is the natural consequence of too easy tasks.
Joshua Reynolds
#92. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is - second only to American political campaigns - the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.
Larry Laudan
#93. If after having been exposed to someone's presence you feel as if you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that presence. You need it like you need pernicious anemia.
William S. Burroughs
#94. We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#95. The offering of only one narrow slice of ourselves is especially pernicious on social networks like Facebook and Instagram, where we show others a glowing highlight reel of our lives, but hide the not-so-pretty behind-the-scenes parts.
Anonymous
#96. World can be a bewildering place,and dreams and ambitions are often paths to the most pernicious of traps
Rohinton Mistry
#97. All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
Edward Abbey
#98. If the chief party, whether it be the people, or the army, or the nobility, which you think most useful and of most consequence to you for the conservation of your dignity, be corrupt, you must follow their humor and indulge them, and in that case honesty and virtue are pernicious.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#99. Among all the diseases of the mind there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery.
Richard Steele
#100. There's little value in seeking to find reasons for why people do what they do, or feel the way they feel. Hatred is a most pernicious thing, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself." "With words.
Steven Erikson
