Crude Quotes
More Crude Quotes
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
christopher hitchens— Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great. 2007. LCC BL2775.3.H58 2007. ISBN 9780446579803. OCLC 70630426.
… there are people in this administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things…
Hans Blix— The Guardian, ibid.
They looked at me like I was some kind of threat. [Mick] Jagger really tried to put me down, but there was no way some crude, lippy guy was going to do a number on me. I was always able to squelch him. I found out that, if you stand up to Mick, he crumbles.
anita pallenberg— On becoming acquainted with the Rolling Stones. As quoted in Up and Down With The Rolling Stones, by Tony Sanchez.
Let me say it here and now. For all Hunter's mindless self-indulgence, which is legendary and crude, he always impressed me with his blind, selfless urge to cut out the crony bestiality of modern society and the political economy that scarred the era.
ralph steadman— Fear And Loathing, p. 67
You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.
max beerbohm— 1911Zuleika Dobson, ch.7.
Yet once more,O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never-sere I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
john milton— 1637 Lycidas, opening lines.
In the hill country, civilization steals in last, and the people retain much of the crude but vigorous mode of expression of the colonial days and earlier.
robert e. howard— From a letter to Robert W. Gordon (February 15, 1926)
He felt a crude ecstasy. He could not have given the reason, but the mountain tormented him, beckoned him, held an answer to something he wanted. It was so pure, so austere.
norman mailer— On Sgt. Sam Croft and Mt. Anaka, in Pt. 3, Ch. 3
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
yann martel— Author's Note, p. xi
Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure — more, doubtless, by life than by words — to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.
a. j. muste— As quoted in American Power and the New Mandarins (2002) by Noam Chomsky, p. 160.
Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
j. robert oppenheimer— Physics in the Contemporary World, Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture at M.I.T. (25 November 1947)
Despite the bare butts and crude sex jokes -- or because of them -- this Adam Sandler vehicle addresses some of the biggest political problems of our time. ... At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it's a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don't dare bring up at dinner parties.
stephanie zacharek— Review of You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008)
The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.
wystan hugh auden— Lines 56-58 (September 1, 1939 (1939))
A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since. Give it me back! The thing's restorative I'the touch and sight.
Robert Browning— Book I : The Ring and the Book.
The virtual suppression of ethical discussion after 1845 produces the semblance of purely descriptive analysis, dressed in the mantle of positivist objectivity, analysis which is, in fact, strung to a framework of crude, because unexplicated, moral assumptions.
john carroll— p. 80 (Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974))
The crude product of nature , the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality , their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality .
mircea eliade— The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) [also published as Cosmos and History (1959)]
Americans ought be listening to Russ Feingold in these defining days for the Republic, because what the Democratic senator from Wisconsin is saying goes to the heart of the question of whether a nation founded in revolt against monarchy will be ruled by laws or by the crude whims of an intemperate sovereign and his out-of-control administration.
russ feingold— The Nation, Feb 12 2006
The sinner's ego is crude that of the saint refined, distilled. Careful! It may be more poisonous!
frederick franck— p. 21 (Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985))
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
john milton— Line 1. (Lycidas (1637))
On one side is the gigantic printing press, a miracle of fine articulation, which turns out the tabloid newspaper: on the other side are the contents of the tabloid itself, symbolically recording the most crude and elementary states of emotion.
Lewis Mumford— Ch. 6, sct. 9
His mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force. There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it. " Talisman " was the closest, but Talisman was too crude a word. Although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.
clifford d. simak— Ch. 12 (Skirmish (1977))
In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
stendhal— Fragments
The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.
charles stross— Glasshouse, Chapter 12: “Bag” (2006, pg. 210)
On the top of the wall lay a structure of burnt brick, about a foot and a half in height, under the tiles and projecting like a coping . ...when the tiles on the roof are broken or thrown down by the wind so that rain-water can leak through, this burnt brick coating will prevent the crude brick from being damaged, and the cornice -like projection will throw off the drops beyond the vertical face, and thus the walls, though of crude brick structure, will be preserved intact.
vitruvius— Chapter VIII, Sec. 18
For crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.
— Ch. 10, sect. 1
Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained...
Andrew Dickson White— Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Ch. 1 (1896)
Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained...
Andrew Dickson White— Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Ch.1 (1896)
Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?) Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books and shallow in himself, crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
john milton— John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671), Book IV, line 322.
The main objective is to learn to think crudely. crude thinking is the great one’s thinking.
bertolt brecht— Dreigroschenroman (1934), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 916.
