Scorn (2 page)

 

Humanity

As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realise how unimportant they are.
Peter Cook

Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.
Sloane Crosley

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
Truman Capote

Life itself is a universally fatal sexually transmitted disease.
Petr Skrabanek

You're far from a perfect creature. But as far as natural selection is concerned, you'll do, and that's why you're here.
Alice Roberts

Life doesn't imitate art. It imitates bad television.
Woody Allen

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.
Dennis Wholey

So hard to teach but so easy to deceive.
Greek Stoic philosopher on mankind

It is not enough to succeed. Friends must fail.
Gore Vidal

I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others.
Lorrie Moore

Happiness is an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
Ambrose Bierce

Insensitivity.
Tennessee Williams's definition of happiness

We become moral when we are unhappy.
Marcel Proust

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
Cicero

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness: poverty and wealth have both failed.
Frank McKinney Hubbard

Have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.
William Hazlitt,
On the Pleasure of Hating

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus

Trying is the first step towards failure.
Homer Simpson

I have no patience whatever with these Gorilla damnifications of humanity.
Thomas Carlyle on Charles Darwin

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realise half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym.
Woody Allen

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.
Sir Joshua Reynolds

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it.
Anatomist P.B. Medawar

The majority of minds are no more to be controlled by strong reason than plumb-pudding is to be grasped by sharp pincers.
George Eliot

Those who know their minds do not necessarily know their hearts.
François de la Rochefoucauld

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do.
Bertrand Russell

Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid.
John Wayne

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
Terry Pratchett

To err is human but to really foul up, you need computers.
Anonymous

Computers are useless. They only give you answers.
Picasso

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar that stretches on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.
George Eliot,
Middlemarch

Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais,
Le Mariage de Figaro

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong.
G.K. Chesterton

He grew up from manhood into boyhood.
Ronald Knox on G.K. Chesterton

It must be a sign of our times that I was asked to observe two minutes' silence at my local library.
Doug Meredith on Remembrance Day

Society is now one polish'd horde,
Form'd of two mighty tribes, the
Bores
and
Bored
.
Lord Byron,
Don Juan, XIII

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Cyril Connolly

Style, like sheer silk, too often hides eczema.
Albert Camus,
The Fall

I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
Oscar Wilde

A certain type of man is only stirred to the heights of passion by administrative inconvenience.
Anthony Powell

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide in 1950

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan

Extreme hopes are born of extreme misery.
Bertrand Russell

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury

If it stinks it's chemistry. If it wiggles, it's biology. If it doesn't work, it's physics.
Anon

The world is formed by unreasonable men. A reasonable man looks at the world and sees how he can fit in with it. An unreasonable man looks at the world and sees how he can change it to fit in with him.
George Bernard Shaw

All of man's unhappiness stems from his inability to stay in a room alone.
Pascal

Hell is other people.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Hull is other people.
Jonathan Cecil, British actor

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, envious, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
William Hazlitt, On Living to One's-Self

People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people.
From
Peep Show

The only people we think of as normal are those we don't know very well.
Sigmund Freud

People who say others are difficult are usually difficult themselves.
Van Morrison

For what do we live but to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice

The belief in the supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad,
Under Western Eyes

A desperate man never forgives a favour.
Dominic Lawson

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principle difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain

He has all the characteristics of a dog except loyalty.
Sam Houston, American politician, on fellow-politician Thomas Jefferson Green.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Mark Twain

If a dog whines it does it because it's in pain or is hungry. But if a human being whines, nine times out of ten it's doing it because it enjoys it.
Julie Burchill

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him.
Dr Johnson

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
W.C. Fields

The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him. So don't.
Roger Scruton

I like animals. It's people who like animals I don't like.
Jean Genet

I love mankind: it's people I can't stand.
Peanuts
character Linus van Pelt

Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of men.
Jorge Luis Borges

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Aldous Huxley

Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
David Hume

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
Bill Watterson

Progress means bad things happen faster.
Terry Pratchett

Shyness is just egotism out of its depth.
Penelope Keith

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Elizabeth Taylor

You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phoney stuff in the cinema and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart.
J. D Salinger,
The Catcher in the Rye

A friend in need is an acquaintance.
Mariella Frostrup

If friendship were cars, then women would constantly be out there tinkering with them, polishing them, servicing them – whereas men would just let them rust away in the front garden.
Christopher Middleton

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Henry Ward Beecher

Trying to be popular in high school is like trying to be mayor of a city that won't exist in four years.
Jenny Holzer

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler

In most of mankind gratitude is merely a secret hope for greater favours.
Duc de la Rochefoucauld

History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided.
Konrad Adenauer

History is gossip.
Robert Frost

History is irony on the move.
Emil Cioran

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.
Seamus Heaney

History is about arrogance, vanity and vapidity. Who better than me to present it?
David Starkey

What is history?
Manuscript scrawl by W.E. Gladstone in a book margin against its author's mention of ‘history'

God cannot alter the past; only historians do that.
Simon Jenkins

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Leo Tolstoy

If it were not for quotations, conversation between gentlemen would consist of an endless succession of ‘what-hos!'
P.G. Wodehouse

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

All quotation is out of context.
Enoch Powell, responding to a complaint that he had quoted someone ‘out of context'

There is nothing so ill-bred as audible laughter, with its disagreeable noise and shocking distortion of the face.
Lord Chesterfield

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Sir Walter Raleigh, after his trial for treason. Attrib.

I am told I am a true cosmopolitan. I am unhappy everywhere.
Stephen Vizinczey, in the
Guardian

I am a Renaissance man, but only in the sense that I wear mauve pantaloons and have tertiary syphilis.
Simon Blackwell

Be yourself. Well, maybe someone a little nicer.
Barbara Bush

If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel.
Joe Pasquale

Should not the Society of Indexers be known as Indexers, Society of, The?
Keith Waterhouse

A spa hotel? It's like a normal hotel, only in reception there's a picture of a pebble.
Rhod Gilbert

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business.
Dave Barry

Often it seems a pity Noah and his party didn't miss the boat.
Mark Twain

A week in which a bunch of loser jihadists slaughtered 132 innocents in Paris to prove the future belongs to them, rather than a civilisation like France.