Terrible Quotes
As quoted in An Examined Faith : Social Context and Religious Commitment (1991) by James Luther Adams and George K. Beach, p. 259
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More Terrible Quotes
The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual – and his rights – as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.
l. neil smith— "Cambodian Road Trip," 15 March 2009
Think well about this, dear brothers and sisters, and you will see that we should have been in a state of terrible chaos, in a fratricidal war, in a country which would no longer be Yugoslavia, but be only a group of petty little states fighting among themselves and destroying each other. But our people do not want that to happen.
josip broz tito— Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 263.
Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American... [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
tench coxe— Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.
Heinrich Heine— Lutetia; or, Paris. From the Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII (1842)
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
toni morrison— Interview with Don Swaim (1987)
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.
Mother Teresa— Albanian-Indian Roman Catholic nun and missionary (1910 - 1997)
I have dumped a girl over the phone - it's terrible isn't it? We got into an argument during a phone call so I basically said, I don't wanna be with you any more,' and she cried... I saw her after that and it was a bit awkward, but we're not enemies now, so that's cool…But I wouldn't recommend it, it's very mean!
justin bieber— Interview with Somebody To Love, as quoted by MTV, June 2010
Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of disorder in the heavens — great catastrophes or conflagrations occur frequently — but evolution gives us a perfectly natural explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers ought to know best.
joseph mccabe— The Story of Religious Controversy (1929), p. 86
I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
Robert McNamara— McNamara, on his 1995 meeting in Vietnam with the former Foreign Minister of Vietnam
Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible.
George Moore— Ch. 3. (Confessions of a Young Man (1886))
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.
— Heinrich Heine, in Lutetia; or, Paris. From the Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII (1842)
Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible .
jorge luis borges— "A Poem by Oscar Wilde" (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
jorge luis borges— "The Immortal", § IV, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)Variant: To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma.
jack london— Chapter Five
Indeed, I greatly fear that for most of our people those implanted "humanitarian" hallucinations are so deep and inveterate that they can be broken, if at all, only by the terrible shock of physical suffering. And that they will surely receive.
revilo p. oliver— "What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
Our heavenly Father is more liberal in His views, and boundless in His mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive; and at the same time more terrible to the workers of iniquity, more awful in the executions of His punishments, and more ready to detect in every false way, than we are apt to suppose Him to be...
smith, joseph, jr.— The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 509.
Our heavenly Father is more liberal in His views, and boundless in His mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive; and at the same time more terrible to the workers of iniquity, more awful in the executions of His punishments, and more ready to detect in every false way, than we are apt to suppose Him to be...
— The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 509.
Peace is a resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war.
judith butler— Judith Butler, The Believer, Interview - Issue 2
terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!
william mcfee— Book II: The City, Ch. IV
terrible Tempis'...
— Who: Timothy
— Source: The Cay
— Notes: Months after Timothy and Phillip are stranded on a cay near the Devil's Mouth, a hurricane hits the tiny island. After the hut blows away, the two run to a palm tree, where Timothy shields Phillip from the harsh rain, wind, and sand. After the storm, Timothy has been partially flayed alive. He soon dies of his wounds.
Severe and terrible punishments are enacted against theft, when it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it.
— 1516 Utopia (English translation1556), bk.1.
I especially denounce the terrible mass murders, which I cannot understand ... I never ordered any killing or tortures where I had the power to prevent such actions!
hermann göring— Göring's closing statement to the Nuremberg tribunal (31 August 1946); as quoted in Witness to Nuremberg (2006) by Richard Sonnenfeldt, p. 70
I've been married too many times. How terrible to change children's affiliations, their affections — to give them the insecurity of placing their trust in someone when maybe that someone won't be there next year.
elizabeth taylor— Elizabeth Taylor : An informal memoir (1965)
The fear of death in the one place was not as strong as another kind of fear, the fear of a world gone crazy, a place where anything could happen, where nothing could be trusted, where nothing was certain. A terrible place.
orson scott card— Chapter 4 (Red Prophet (1988))
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
h. p. lovecraft— "Ex Oblivione"
[The poll tax] was a classic case of a good idea being entrusted to Chris Patten and becoming a terrible failure.
norman tebbit— On the BBC (16 November, 2000).
I want to make sure that if my government ever does this horrible, terrible, extraordinary thing, that somebody takes responsibility for it and that it be out there in the open and subject to accountability. ... Though I understand the danger of legitimating something that should not be legitimated, on balance in a democracy, I prefer accountability.
— Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, debating David D. Cole Pre-emption: Preventive, coercive, or both? (2007).
I think that the tendency for most people is to fall back on a comic interpretation of things because things are so sad, so terrible. If you didn't laugh you'd kill yourself. But the truth of the matter is that existence in general is very very tragic, very very sad, very brutal and very unhappy.
— Woody Allen, interview in "Interview with Woody Allen: 'Nothing Pleases Me More than Being Thought of as a European Filmmaker'" by Helene Zuber, in Der Spiegel (20 June 2005)
TV—a clever contraction, derived from the words terrible Vaudeville. We call it a medium, because nothing's well done.
Goodman Ace— Letter to Groucho Marx, published in The Groucho Letters
