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.
