Contempt Quotes

Beyond doubt it would speedily verify the proverb that a nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.

Yukio Mishima

As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.

Michelle Alexander

Shame evokes anxiety about what will happen if someone really knows is, but, because it is impossible to for anxiety and anger to be felt simultaneously, we can dream our anxiety by employing anger or rage in the form of contempt... Contempt, because it feels more powerful has always helped us feel safer and more powerful than the anxiety we feel when we experience shame. [3]

Wendy J. Mahill

Hypercritical, Shaming ParentsHypercritical and shaming parents send the same message to their children as perfectionistic parents do - that they are never good enough. Parents often deliberately shame their children into minding them without realizing the disruptive impact shame can have on a child's sense of self. Statements such as "You should be ashamed of yourself" or "Shame on you" are obvious examples. Yet these types of overtly shaming statements are actually easier for the child to defend against than are more subtle forms of shaming, such as contempt, humiliation, and public shaming.There are many ways that parents shame their children. These include belittling, blaming, contempt, humiliation, and disabling expectations.-BELITTLING. Comments such as "You're too old to want to be held" or "You're just a cry-baby" are horribly humiliating to a child. When a parent makes a negative comparison between his or her child and another, such as "Why can't you act like Jenny? See how she sits quietly while her mother is talking," it is not only humiliating but teaches a child to always compare himself or herself with peers and find himself or herself deficient by comparison.-BLAMING. When a child makes a mistake, such as breaking a vase while rough-housing, he or she needs to take responsibility. But many parents go way beyond teaching a lesson by blaming and berating the child: "You stupid idiot! Do you think money grows on trees? I don't have money to buy new vases!" The only thing this accomplishes is shaming the child to such an extent that he or she cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his or her head held high.-CONTEMPT. Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can make him or her feel disgusting or offensive. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely negative attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me with the kind of expectant expression that said, "What are you up to now?" or with a look of disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me.-HUMILIATION. There are many ways a parent can humiliate a child, such as making him or her wear clothes that have become dirty. But as Gershen Kaufman stated in his book Shame: The Power of Caring, "There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beating." I can personally attest to this. In addition to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch of a tree, and she often did this outside, in front of the neighbors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul.-DISABLING EXPECTATIONS. Parents who have an inordinate need to have their child excel at a particular activity or skill are likely to behave in ways that pressure the child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she often experiences a binding self-consciousness. This self-consciousness - the painful watching of oneself - is very disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible.Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment to them. Such messages as "I can't believe you could do such a thing" or "I am deeply disappointed in you" accompanied by a disapproving tone of voice and facial expression can crush a child's spirit.

Beverly Engel

In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important question: Why did academics and journalists feel so strongly about allegations of ritualistic abuse, to the point of pervasively misrepresenting the available evidence and treating women disclosing ritualistic abuse, and those workers who support them, with barely concealed contempt? It is of course true that there are fringe practitioners in the field of organised abuse, just as there are fringe practitioners in many other health-related fields. However, the contrast between the measured tone of the majority of therapists and social workers writing on ritualistic abuse, and the over-blown sensationalism of their critics, could not be starker. Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse. It is perhaps unsurprising that social movements for people accused of sexual abuse would engage in such hyperbole, but why did this rhetoric find so many champions in academia and the media?

Michael Salter

I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.

E.F. Schumacherm

[A]nd you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestow

Thomas Guthrie

People who use snark attacks confuse cleverness with cruelty.

Debra Crown LPC-S LCDC

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

James Baldwin

It was then I realized that no one can escape his age, and that my dangerous contempt had melted like ice the moment someone was kind enough to show they cared about me, and in a way that suited me.

Raymond Radiguet

all men carry murder in their hearts, yet even so, the poisoner is beneath contempt.

George R.R. Martin

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 Brontë

It is the leader’s job to model and enforce the values and behaviors that make up the company culture. “Model” the behaviors is key. “Do as I say” only breeds contempt from others.

Beth Ramsay

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

A prince need take little account of conspiracies if the people are disposed in his favor.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand, or are you mongoloids really talking about me?

John Kennedy Toole

Its crazy when people of high moral standards, feel its okay for an intimate friend to insult them in a jovial way, forgeting that even casual friends can do just the same in a jovial way.

Michael Bassey Johnson

We may see the small Value God has for Riches, by the People he gives the

Alexander Pope

Bandar had effortlessly converted Ratiram’s grit into the smoke rings that he blew triumphantly in the air.

Pawan Mishra

He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and bought women. Outside these two poles of existence, he understood nothing. Braggart, brawler, contemptuous of every living person, he despised the whole world from the heights of his ignorance.

Guy de Maupassant

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

John Steinbeck

We drove on in silence, Dad shaking his head in disgust every few minutes. I stared at him, wondering how it was we got to this place. How the same man who held his infant daughter and kissed her tiny face could one day be so determined to shut her out of his life, out of his heart. How, even when she reacyhed out to him in distress - Please, Dad, come get me, come save me - all he could do was accuse her. How that same daughter could look at him and feel nothing but contempt and blame and resentment, because that's all that radiated off of him for so many years and it had become contagious.

Jennifer Brown

Sarcasm is a manifestation of anger, and anger can make you the puppet of your opponents.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

Demons would often try to make me feel some negative emotion, like hatred or contempt. Because the only way I could become vulnerable to them, is if I indulged in some negative emotion, in their presence. In the realm of hatred and anger, and other negative emotions, demons are the masters.

Alexei Maxim Russell

Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture — these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise.

Fuminori Nakamura

Anxiety can make anybody act nasty, big or small. You will be tested for your strength, and if you are seen as too weak, you will sometimes be treated abusively, discarded and avoided. I'm not saying that this should happen. I'm simply describing human beings as they are.

Cory Duchesne

A douchebag has an image to maintain. He is not real. He is the kind of guy who will change his last name into something cooler and more impressive.

Cory Duchesne

..What our contempt often hurls from us,We wish it our again; the present pleasure,By revolution lowering,does becomeThe opposite of itself..

William Shakespeare

I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder—a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Soon he essentially stopped talking. "I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode," he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. "I am surprised," he wrote, "by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable." Later he added, "I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.

Michael Finkel

What people instinctively regard as cool is real power - consistency. Pathetic is not cool. Being locked in a tragedy, but not knowing it. That's lameness.

Cory Duchesne

Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised. One can only dominate another human soul if one knows, understands, and with the utmost tact despises the person one is subjugating.

Sándor Márai

When you love someone, you end up caring about each and every person they love. When you hate someone, you end up caring about every single person who hates them.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.

Ben Lerner

She'd always been a little contemptuous of beauty, as though it was something you had to trade away some other vital thing for.

Holly Black

You can spit on a rose, but it's still a rose.

Marty Rubin

We would sneer sometimes at how pointless it all was, all those bourgeois souls wrapping themselves in luxury, isolating themselves from the raw edges of the word; and in between puffs, we would smile, and dream of owning those streets, dreaming the same dreams that we scorned others for.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I’ve done it so many times. First, there’s a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about, depending on their views: the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the President, or the entire US government. It is a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime except that now it is applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.

Sebastian Junger

Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...

Elizabeth Goudge

Familiarity breeds sentiment before contempt.

Amanda Craig

Between Countess Nordston and Levin there had been established those relations, not infrequent in society, in which two persons, while ostensibly remaining on friendly terms, are contemptuous of each other to such a degree that they cannot even treat each other seriously and cannot even insult each one another.

Leo Tolstoy

Arrogant men with knowledge make more noise from their mouth than making a sense from their mind.

Amit Kalantri

I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Can I help you?" he said, in a manner which indicated very clearly that not only did he not wish to help them, but also that he resented the implication that he ought to

Graham Austin-King

Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.

T.F. Hodge

I would rather a romantic relationship turn into contempt than turn into apathy. The passion in the extremities make it appear as though it once meant something. We grow from hot or cold, but lukewarm is the biggest insult.

Criss Jami

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