Vermin Quotes
More Vermin Quotes
He changes his opinions as he does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed principles; as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels with it. He has no satisfaction but the chase after truth, runs a question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like a vermin, and starts some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the leaders perpetually at fault.
william hazlitt— "On the Character of Cobbett"
Given the state of the planet, humans, or some humans, must now be categorized as vermin.
— 1992 The Intellectuals and the Masses, postscript.
I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
jonathan swift— 1726 Gulliver'sTravels,'A Voyage to Brobdingnag', ch.6.
Attention vermin, you are in the presence of a colossus.
— Said as a joke when asked for an idea for a new catchphrase. (no-one knows why anyone would say this)
— Napoleon Dynamite, 2004
I fear the vermin that shall undermineSenate and citadel and school and shrine.
edwin markham— The Vermin in the Dark, stanza 5, lines 1 and 2, in The Speaker (1911), volume 6, number 3, page 249.
We all want notoriety; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical.
George Moore— Ch. 16. (Confessions of a Young Man (1886))
No visiting angel could have guessed that this bland orb [Earth] teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.
Olaf Stapledon— Ch.II Interstellar Travel, p. 15
I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
jonathan swift— Voyage to Brobdingnag, Ch. 6
The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.
buckley, william f., jr.— National Review, 16 January 1962
War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals... ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ – this is the practical commandment of socialism... [Our] common aim [is] to clean the land of Russia of all vermin, of fleas – the rogues, of bugs – the rich, and so on and so forth.
— As quoted in How to Organise Competition? Collected Works, Vol. 26, pages. 411, 414
That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
friedrich nietzsche— “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 130
There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil ! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.
j. r. r. tolkien— Letter (September 1944)
He who has ever turned with abhorrence from the skeleton of a beast which has been picked whole by birds or vermin, must confess that habit alone could have enabled him to endure the sight of the mangled bones and flesh of a dead carcase which every day cover his table.
— John Hawkesworth, in his edition of Jonathan Swift's Works.
You vermin are our ancestors. Mutant trash I'll tidy myself!
— Who: Kamijo
— Notes: Said to Burai, who he then starts shooting at. Burai advances on him, and he pulls the pin on a grenade, killing them both.
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad.
henry ward beecher— Lectures to Young Men: On Various Important Subjects (1856) Lecture IV : Portrait Gallery
[W]e must know and be out of all doubt, that the Pope hath but a devilish Synagogue, and that all his Clergy is but filth & stench, all these varlets that have cast aside the Church of God, are but vermin. Although the Pope, who is Antichrist, be set in God’s sanctuary, (as we have seen before [2 Thes. 2.4]) yet notwithstanding, he is not worthy to be taken and accounted for a minister of the Church, nor all his mates.
john calvin— Sermon on 1 Timothy, ch. 3. The 22 Sermon upon the second Chapter Sermons on Timothy and Titus (16th-17th century facsimile editions), p. 265. pdf images
