insult quotes

It is all too rare today to hear the clear, clean ring of a really original insult.

-Jim R(ichard) Carrigan
  In Time, 28  Aug.

An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.

- Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
  Letter to his son, 9 Oct.

   Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

- G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
Quoted in The NewYork Times,16 Nov1967.

It is a standing insult tosportsmen to have to play undera rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack and push their opponents, and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kidney. The lines marking a penalty area are a disgrace to the playing fields of a public school.

- C(harles) B(urgess) Fry
  Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute.

- Noel Gallagher
  In the NewYork Times,14  Jan.

This [Magna Carta] has been forced from the King. It constitutes an insult to the Holy See, a serious weakening of the royal power, a disgrace to the English nation, a danger to all Christendom, since this civil war obstructs the crusade. Therefore†we condemn the charter and forbid the King to keep it, or the barons and their supporters to make him do so, on pain of excommunication.

-Pope Innocent III originally Lotario de' Conti di Segni
  Papal Bull, 24  Aug.

They share the insult of each other's presence.

- Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
  On characters in his novels. Down There on a Visit.

This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit inthe face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny,Time, Love, Beauty†what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off-key perhaps, but I will sing.

- Henry Valentine Miller
  Tropic of Cancer.

You have heard the sound of the white soldier's axe on the Little Piney. His presence here is†an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we to give up their sacred graves to be ploughed for corn? Dakotas, I am for war.

-Red Cloud original name Mahpiua Luta
  Speech before war council at Fort Laramie,Wyoming.