Top 42 Sordid Past Quotes
#1. As far as the media's concerned, Mrs. Obama deserves this. Look at the sordid past. Look at our slave past, look at the discriminatory past. It's only fair that people of color get their taste of the wealth of America too.
Rush Limbaugh
#2. Oh yes," said Nanny Piggins. "I can regale people with anecdotes from my sordid past and think at the same time.
R.A. Spratt
#3. To be honest, I consider my very sordid past a blessing; if only because it made my wonderful present - and my bright future - possible!
Karen E. Quinones Miller
#5. Men were created for something better than merely to make money. A close application to business, until a competence is gained, is one of the chief virtues; but to continue in trade long after this result is obtained, is one of the signs, not to be mistaken, of a sordid and ignoble nature.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#6. The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
Adam Gopnik
#7. When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?
Adam Smith
#8. There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God.
John Calvin
#9. If we should cease to be generous and charitable because another is sordid and ungrateful, it would be much in the power of vice to extinguish Christian virtues.
Roger L'Estrange
#10. It will never belong in a Hallmark card, but I drove a car into a house and killed a man for you. You chained me up for days and I still wanted to come back and talk over our darkly sordid, slightly kinky, and a lot warped relationship. Face it, you're stuck with me.
Kylie Scott
#11. One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find ... this.
Joe Abercrombie
#12. I am ashamed of a human race that can continue to allow the sordid ambitions of politicized groups who genuinely feel that right is on their side, and can therefore instigate such atrocities in the name of their own sense of right and wrong.
Ralph Steadman
#13. In this world is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#14. The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.
Vincent Starrett
#15. No Task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God's sight.
John Calvin
#17. As for myself, my course is clear. A British subject I was born - a British subject I will die. With my utmost effort, with my latest breath, will I oppose the 'veiled treason' which attempts by sordid means and mercenary proffers to lure our people from their allegiance.
John A. Macdonald
#18. If one thinks only of winning, a sordid victory will be worse than a defeat. For the most part, it becomes a squalid defeat.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
#19. The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.
Thomas Merton
#20. Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#21. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. England has the most sordid literary scene I've ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs.
William S. Burroughs
#23. Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.
Tom Lehrer
#24. I wished Dean and Carlo were there - then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The
Jack Kerouac
#26. Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.
Marcus Aurelius
#27. What the world stigmatises as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.
Anne Bronte
#28. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#29. Once you've crawled into what's commonly thought of as the sordid underbelly of life, you realize it's all just different versions of normal.
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
#30. The timid man calls himself cautious, the sordid man thrifty.
Publilius Syrus
#31. It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!
Luigi Pirandello
#32. Despite the sometimes sordid turns his life took, Michael Jackson always held my fascination, like he did for most of us.
Shawn Amos
#33. I'm sick of hearing, thinking and talking about Woody Allen. Nonetheless, the allegations against him continue to capture our national attention because so much of the story is strange and sordid.
Roxane Gay
#34. Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.
Rudolf Rocker
#35. Race preservation is a myth ... a myth that you all have lived by - a sordid thing that has arisen out of your social structure. The race ends every day. When a man dies the race ends for him - so far as he's concerned there is no longer any race.
Clifford D. Simak
#36. He seemed to see his fellow creatures grotesquely, and he was angry with them because they were grotesque; life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh.
W. Somerset Maugham
#37. Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.
Robert Walser
#38. War is honorable
In those who do their native rights maintain;
In those whose swords an iron barrier are
Between the lawless spoiler and the weak;
But is, in those who draw th' offensive blade
For added power or gain, sordid and despicable
As meanest office of the worldly churl.
Joanna Baillie
#39. As the leaves of trees are said to absorb all noxious qualities of the air, and to breathe forth a purer atmosphere, so it seems to me as if they drew from us all sordid and angry passions, and breathed forth peace and philanthropy.
Washington Irving
#40. The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.
Aleister Crowley
#41. In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. For hearts that are kindly, with virtue and peace, and not seeking blindly a hoard to increase; for those who are grieving o'er life's sordid plan; for souls still believing in heaven and man; for homes that are lowly with love at the board; for things th
Walter Mason Camp
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