Top 25 Condescending Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Condescending Quotes from famous people such as Ransom Riggs, Steve Carell, Talib Kweli, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Coolidge, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Teenagers are extremely smart, and if they think for ev

Teenagers are extremely smart, and if they think for even a second that an author is ‘writing down’ to them, or mimicking their voice poorly, or condescending to them in any way, they will throw the book across the room.
Ransom Riggs
Don’t underestimate your kids. Don’t be condescending, because they’re children but they’re not stupid.
Steve Carell
What’s more condescending and corny than someone telling you how much more money they have than you and telling you basically, ‘I don’t care about poor people,’ which is a large part of what you hear of corporate hip-hop on the radio.
Talib Kweli
Two phrases I hate in reference to female characters are ‘strong’ and ‘feisty.’ They really annoy me. It’s the most condescending thing. You say that about a three-year-old. It infantilises women.
Helen Mirren
There’s something about me that suggests I don’t have an intelligent atom in me at all. So people say things to me that they wouldn’t say to other people. Insulting, condescending things. They don’t think I notice. But, of course, I’m taking it all in.
Jennifer Coolidge
Usually, ‘All Lives Matter’ comes as a response to ‘Black Lives Matter’; it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So when people say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ a lot of times the response ‘All Lives Matter’ can seem very condescending, dismissive to ‘Black Lives Matter.’
Benjamin Watson
Generational thinking has always been reductive and condescending.
Adam Conover
Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they’re a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.
Curtis Sittenfeld
Indians are sometimes accused of being condescending toward Westerners and of being excessively preachy in their attitude toward other nations. That accusation is sometimes correct.
Gary Weiss
Generation after generation, there is this never-ending, contemptuous, condescending attitude to the next generation or the next way of thinking: music, art, politics, whatever. And I have never been like that.
Jean-Michel Jarre
I first became interested in style when I was 16 and I had my first couple of gigs. I realised I couldn’t look like the people I was performing to. Not in a condescending way, but just that it would be weird if I was wearing exactly what someone in the crowd was wearing.
Tinie Tempah
Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media – of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we’ve already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We’re out of ‘affirmative actions’ of all kinds.
James Howard Kunstler
The absolute worst thing that you ever can do, in my opinion, in bringing science to the general public, is be condescending or judgmental. It is so opposite to the way science needs to be brought forth.
Brian Greene
Words change over time. ‘Condescending,’ for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen’s world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.
Nancy Kress
It’s not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don’t recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.
J. D. Vance
It takes a lot of courage, when everyone is asking you what you want to do, if you say that you want to be a musician or an actor; people can be very condescending and say, ‘Oh, that’s so sweet, good luck with that!’ It can be very frustrating.
James Norton
I hate a movie that will end by telling you that the first thing you should do is learn to love yourself. That is so insulting and condescending, and so meaningless. My characters don’t learn to love each other or themselves.
Charlie Kaufman
I don’t like intellectuals, or, at least, people who call themselves that way, because I am under the impression that there is always something condescending in their demeanour, and I don’t like condescending people.
Carine Roitfeld
I believe that it’s condescending to think that women and their claims can’t stand up to interrogation and can’t handle skepticism.
Bari Weiss
Bieber is the first mega YouTube star, born inexplicably out of a novel and disruptive medium. It has, of course, always been so for pop culture: feverish bubbles, silly novelty acts and disconcerting new forces impose themselves on a reluctant and condescending media.
Michael Wolff
Aaron Sorkin is why people hate liberals. He’s a smug, condescending know-it-all who isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.
Alex Pareene
If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done.
Scott Adams
To be someplace for ten years or to work anywhere for ten years is a tough deal. But to work in the WWE for that long, knowing how their dressing room is run with this top heavy, condescending ‘do this and nothing else’ attitude, it gets tiresome.
Shane Douglas
I keep seeing the headline on articles that says something like ‘Mary Gauthier Helping Our Veterans.’ It’s troubling – and it’s condescending. Whatever I’m doing as a songwriter to help them tell their stories, they’re giving it back to me double, triple, quadruple.
Mary Gauthier
The Vixen character is not quite me. A part of that is putting up this huge front of being strong, impenetrable, really tough and a little bit condescending.
Jenny Ryan