Top 30 Pernicious Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Pernicious Quotes from famous people such as James Jones, Joseph Heller, Ernestine Rose, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Noam Chomsky, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

You see, as I go along, I've come to consider bravery a

You see, as I go along, I’ve come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can’t get rid of it.
James Jones
But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
Joseph Heller
The main cause is a pernicious falsehood propagated against her being, namely that she is inferior by her nature. Inferior in what? What has man ever done that woman, under the same advantages could not do?
Ernestine Rose
Versification is, indeed, indispensable for music, but rhyme, solely for rhyming’s sake, most pernicious.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.
Noam Chomsky
I regard affirmative action as pernicious – a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.
Camille Paglia
Imagine how many women could excel in science if not for the pernicious myth that science and math are a man’s game. Likewise, fitness isn’t defined by the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world.
Kyle Hill
I worry about the very pernicious way we elevate and separate ourselves from other beasts, the way we rationalize our comfort and ease, our worship of the self, as healthy. It’s enticing, but with a terrible taint of evil.
Lydia Millet
Cancer is the most pernicious, insidious, disgusting disease of life.
Pierce Brosnan
South Africa was to evolve into the most pernicious example of the criminal practise of colonial and white minority domination.
Thabo Mbeki
Saudi Arabia inflames the Sunni-Shiite divide and sets a pernicious example of intolerance by banning churches.
Nicholas Kristof
While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.
Murray Rothbard
I really feel like social media – it’s like all these tiny stages that you put yourself on. And you come to rely on these likes and favorites, and it’s this applause and this validation that you start to need. Then it’s like you don’t know how to soothe yourself, and I think it’s very pernicious.
Carrie Brownstein
Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.
Andre Gide
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
John Updike
Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it’s skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
Noreena Hertz
When one English person speaks, another one immediately classifies him. No class system in the world is so audible, which is also why it is so pernicious and enduring.
Andrew Neil
Delia Smith is, actually, my bete noire. I consider her a most pernicious influence.
Roger Scruton
For many gay and bisexual men of color, economic inequalities add to the pernicious effects of oppression and homophobia.
Karamo Brown
We all understand that the debasement of a nation’s coinage is very pernicious and must prove disastrous to its commerce. How much more dangerous is the debasement of the spiritual coinage!
Virchand Gandhi
Anorexia is pernicious and not something which goes away overnight.
Edward Zwick
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Leo Tolstoy
The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.
Edward Dahlberg
Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.
Allan Bloom
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it’s how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
Maryanne Wolf
Perhaps the most pernicious strain of contemporary criticism says one thing before it says anything else, says it to whatever historical event or cultural happenstance is supposedly at issue: ‘You can’t fool me.’
Greil Marcus
The cultural conversation around privilege has grown vibrant enough that the ultimate privilege is to just ignore it altogether. Some decry this conversation as pernicious. I don’t agree.
Rumaan Alam
The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it’s a totally false dichotomy.
George R. R. Martin
No evil can result from its inhibition more pernicious than its toleration.
Martin Van Buren
All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former – of the corruption of the will.
Alexander Herzen