Mutilated Quotes
More Mutilated Quotes
"Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.”
charles fort— p279
Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it — Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism.
andré malraux— Part IV, Chapter VII
This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven.
mervyn peake— Titus Groan ch.1
I'd received death threats over the phone. Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up. So I was not a 'good guy'.
thompson, hugh, jr.— In a 2004 interview with 60 minutes. [4]
It is the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence.
georges bataille— p. xxvii (On Nietzsche (1945))
The cross of the Cruxifixion without the cross of the Resurrection is the symbol of a mutilated Christianity.
frederick franck— p. 121 (Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985))
All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane.
stephen spender— "Fall of a City"
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, "How do we tell truths that might hurt?" (1975). Published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17:5 (May 1982), pp. 13–15.
Folly such as yours, Grac'd with a sword, and worthier of a fan, Has made what enemies could ne'er have done. Our arch of empire, stedfast but for you, A mutilated structure, soon to fall.
— William Cowper, in The Task (1785), Book I, line 770
In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.
herbert marcuse— p. 62 (One-Dimensional Man (1964))
Since, under the work-pressure of the millennium now ending, pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-contempt.
— Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, pg. 24), E. Jephcott, trans. Written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
