Top 140 Contempt Quotes

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

Today, ‘fat’ has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.

More negatives write than call. It’s a cheap shot for me to go on the air with the critical letters or E-mail I get because the reaction of the listeners is always an instantaneous expression of sympathy for me and contempt for the poor critic.

God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of person he selects to receive it.

The sword of contempt has kept the judiciary away from searching public scrutiny, particularly within the mainstream media. The judiciary is obviously happy to live with this situation as well.

Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse.

Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

In order to feel contempt, you generally need to cherish some kind of feelings.

The wide and unregulated power of contempt given to the courts has been deliberately interpreted by the courts in a manner which has served to intimidate the media from exposing corruption and misbehaviour by the courts and judges.

I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That’s what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

Like any friendship or marriage, familiarity breeds more contempt, and love, and everything.

The particular article ought in my opinion to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile to touch.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

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.

It is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

Terrorism is contempt for human dignity.

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.

Clinton’s hands remain incredibly clean, don’t they, and Tony Blair’s smile remains as wide as ever. I view these guises with profound contempt.

This court is in contempt of human life, dignity and justice.

I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons.

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.

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.

Above all, it was the style of Quakerism I was brought up with – an aggressive contempt for popular opinion. The assumption is that most people think something that is wrong, which is great.

I never met Lou Reed, never was one of those journalists lucky enough to be the object of his derision, contempt, condescension, indifference, and occasional piercing honesty.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

In 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff who was ordered by a federal court to stop racially profiling and was convicted of criminal contempt when he refused. Arpaio, by targeting Latinx people, was violating both the U.S. Constitution and our civil rights.

Anger and hate against one we love steels our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed.

I have problems with a lot of photography, particularly street photography and photojournalism – objectifying the other, finding the contempt and exoticism that you might feel within yourself or toward yourself and projecting it out to others. There can be an abusive power to photography, too.

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

I want to remind people that the Nazis weren’t able to take the Jews to the crematoriums immediately. The German people wouldn’t have allowed for it. Instead, the Nazis had to change public opinion. They marginalized the Jewish people, disparaged them, and made them objects of contempt.

Whence it is somewhat strange that any men from so mean and silly a practice should expect commendation, or that any should afford regard thereto; the which it is so far from meriting, that indeed contempt and abhorrence are due to it.

There is a certain belief that so long as something is published in cyberspace there is no need to respect the laws of contempt or libel. This is mistaken.

But we’re very much an American band and that’s that. I think that’s part of the appeal outside of this country and it might be part of the reason people turned away from us within this country, because familiarity breeds contempt.

To confer dignity, forgive. To express contempt, forget.

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

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.

We appeal to Conservatives who just can’t see themselves voting for the corruption and the scandals and the contempt of parliamentary institutions. And of course, we also appeal to people in other parties who are disappointed in their own leadership.

Isn’t it fitting that so many of those who have contempt for the private sector will soon find themselves back in it?

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.

Democratic societies can no longer give religious fanatics a free hand to abuse and murder non believers. Such action betrays contempt for the basic human rights which animate any democracy with meaning.

If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.

For 200 years, the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the U.S. and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt.

Contempt for China on the part of the enemy is his weak point. Knowledge of this weak point is our strong point.

Nicaragua dealt with the problem of terrorism in exactly the right way. It followed international law and treaty obligations. It collected evidence, brought the evidence to the highest existing tribunal, the International Court of Justice, and received a verdict – which, of course, the U.S. dismissed with contempt.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

I’d like liberals to listen to my show and not feel offended. The fact that the love of my life was a liberal, I think that probably surprises people who expect me to spew just contempt for the other side.

‘Free’ is more of that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ kind of thing. It’s about saying ‘Wait, I’m longing for something more than I have and I don’t know what it is that I want, but I know I want it.’ It has nothing to do with what I’m going through, personally.

The pollution they produce, market, sell, and show to billions around the world is at its core contemptuous of the country that gave them better lives than nearly 100 percent of everybody who’s ever lived. And they pass that contempt along for everyone to see.

Comedy is defiance. It’s a snort of contempt in the face of fear and anxiety. And it’s the laughter that allows hope to creep back on the inhale.

What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

My philosophy is familiarity breeds contempt.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.

To me, it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.

Radical Islamic fundamentalists harbor contempt for our democratic way of life and, given the opportunity, will stop at nothing to accomplish their goal of bringing our country to its knees.

I am not one of those people who has contempt for Hillary Clinton. I think she’s served our nation. I think there are things that she’s done that are very good.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Paralysis in decision-making breeds frustration and contempt from the electorate, and provides the perfect seedbed for demagogues who fill the vacuum with populist simplicities, hatred of opposition and lies.

The jury had down right contempt for punk rock grass roots ethics.

Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.

The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

Not that long ago – in my parents’ lives, in fact – actors in minstrel shows wore blackface to mimic and mock African Americans. These performances were based in contempt and gave people an opportunity to act out their prejudices.

If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it – London, the people of the south.

Contempt is the only asymmetrical facial expression, so it’s easy to spot once you’re aware of its signs. One researcher has successfully tracked it in couples as a predictor of divorce. When someone is angry at you, you’ve still got traction with them, but when they display contempt, you’ve been dismissed.

Where aspirations outstrip opportunities, law-abiding society becomes the victim. Attitudes of contempt toward the law are forged in this crucible and form the inner core of the beliefs of organized adult crime.

Trump’s real Achilles heel, and the thing most likely to keep him out of the White House, is his brazen contempt for women (plus his lack of impulse control and inability to stay off his Android phone).

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

There is an insolence which none but those who themselves deserve contempt can bestow, and those only who deserve no contempt can bear.

Only the contemptible fear contempt.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

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.

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Don’t hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.

We used to fight for democracy. Democracy used to matter. We now treat it with contempt. We have turned our backs on values that we built up over hundreds of years, for the benefit of politicians in Europe. To me, that is heartbreaking.

What looks like enjoyment is the sneer of contempt. That’s not a smile.

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.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

I have nothing but contempt for Gadhafi. I’m not a Gadhafi supporter in any way. However, it’s not clear to me that it’s a vital and compelling national security objective of the United States that we ought to use military force to remove him from power. He’s not the only unpleasant and unsavory dictator in the world.

Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It’s our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.

Republicans today have given the country conservatism in the spirit of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance about the world, contempt for expertise, and raw appeals to white identity politics presaged Trump’s incendiary campaign.

The kind of support the down-and-out need is the kind we have always refused them, the kind that would mean engaging with them not as objects of contempt, but as fellow human beings.

The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism.

One predictor for divorce is contempt, which to me is just another word for disrespect.

Having enjoyed enormous powers, including the power of contempt, without any accountability, the higher judiciary has over the years, trampled the toes of many persons and institutions, particularly the media.

Not wanting to suffer criticism, the judiciary has used its power of contempt to stifle criticism.

When you celebrate somebody’s bad work on the terms that define their good work, how can that artist have anything but contempt for an audience that can’t tell the good from the bad?

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.

A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.

My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.

The message was always, ‘It’s good to be pretty, but don’t look like you’re trying to be pretty!’ Inherent in that is a lot of misogyny, I think, because the implication is, ‘You must work hard to achieve a feminine ideal for which society has nothing but contempt.’

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.

The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy.

The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience.

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.

Sometimes I think that Rush Limbaugh is the dumbest man in America. This happens whenever I take him at face value and forget that he is basically an entertainer with contempt for his audience. He will tell them anything.

Constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.

The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.

President Obama has contempt for real money.

My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is – brain damage – is too expensive.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

I don’t have any contempt for the men who have to have jobs and have to commute and have to pay the mortgage and have to get their kids an education. To me, that’s the backbone of America, to coin a phrase.

Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, ‘Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach,’ forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt.

One of the most dysfunctional beliefs of successful people is our contempt for simplicity and structure. We believe that we are above needing structure to help us on seemingly simple tasks.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people’s hope.

Earth to Democrats: Displaying contempt for the American people when you are being paid by those people to serve their interests is generally not a good political move.

There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt: and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing.

We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government.

I hate going to L.A. and dealing with the contempt people have for television and television actors. It’s unbelievable the kind of attitude people take toward what is the most exciting medium we’ve got right now.

In Ghazalia, Mr. Hussein showed his contempt for the majority Shiites in ways large and small. He refused to allow them even one mosque, while the Sunnis had nearly a dozen. To worship, the Shiites had to cross an inconveniently located bridge over the sewage canal to Shula.

And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna give five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for Contempt of Court, but we’re gonna kill ya!

There’s two extremes in male sport: there’s complete and total worship of them, or complete and utter contempt. Those extremes create huge problems at either end. And it creates distance, too, and leads them into a bubble.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt – you know, I’m an artist, man, I don’t do that family stuff – has begun to seem really important.

I think familiarity breeds contempt. I mean, we’ll never get another Greta Garbo will we? Someone would go in with a camera Sellotaped to the bottom of a tray trying to get film of her with no make-up on.

Between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt.

I do not mind if a PM or leader of the opposition is single but if he or she chooses to dispense with marriage despite living with someone and having children, then I think that shows a contempt for marriage which sends an unfortunate message.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

Rotten travesty. Yeah. Send me to jail for contempt. Try that. Go ahead.

I have equal contempt for both left and right radicals.

In everything I do, I want people to get the message of acceptance, to learn not to practice contempt without investigation. I have an obligation to do it.

In my teens, I eyed my adulthood with trepidation, as if stalked by a stranger – one who would seize control as if by demonic possession and regard my fledgling incarnation with contempt.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.

Bringing accountability to the judiciary must be preceded by frank public discussion and debate. Unfortunately that cannot get started with the threat of contempt looming over people.

My father loved democracy. He loved the ancient Greeks because they invented democracy, and he shared their contempt for those who refused to participate in the political process.

We must reject the politics of meanness and contempt that increasingly dominate our airwaves and Internet.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

We are not, in some fundamental ways, a single country. The map of that vast red swatch of states and rural counties that voted for Trump, and the blue coastal edges and scattered urban centers where Clinton won, are a pictograph of mutual contempt.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.