148 Quotes Tagged: hypocrisy

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ...'

She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

And the priests looked down into the pit of injustice and they turned their faces away and said, 'Our kingdom is not as the kingdom of this world. Our life on earth is but a pilgrimage. The soul lives on humility and patience,' at the same time screwing the poor from their last centime. They settled down among their treasures and ate and drank with princes and to the starving they said, 'Suffer. Suffer as he suffered on the cross for it is the will of God.'

And anyone believes what they hear over and over again, so the poor instead of bread made do with a picture of the bleeding, scourged, and nailed-up Christ and prayed to that image of their helplessness. And the priests said, 'Raise your hands to heaven and bend your knees and bear your suffering without complaint. Pray for those that torture you, for prayer and blessing are the only stairways which you can climb to paradise.'

And so they chained down the poor in their ignorance so that they wouldn't stand up and fight their bosses who ruled in the name of the lie of divine right.

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to do is to reverse this skill and he creates very ‘gifted’ improvisers. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.

There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.

An unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end.

However, we must put up without clothes as they are—they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us—to advertise what we wear them to conceal.

Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.

I am not superior than anybody, don't say i am, else i won't defend you when you get caught.

The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.

"I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!

Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'."

[Lobachevsky]

Stand up to hypocrisy. If you don't, the hypocrites will teach. Stand up to ignorance, because if you don't, the ignorant will run free to spread ignorance like a disease. Stand up for truth. If you don't, then there is no truth to your existence. If you don't stand up for all that is right, then understand that you are part of the reason why there is so much wrong in the world.

Now, I appeal to the consciences of those that persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other men upon pretence of religion, whether they do it out of friendship and kindness towards them or no? And I shall then indeed, and not until then, believe they do so, when I shall see those fiery zealots correcting, in the same manner, their friends and familiar acquaintance for the manifest sins they commit against the precepts of the Gospel; when I shall see them persecute with fire and sword the members of their own communion that are tainted with enormous vices and without amendment are in danger of eternal perdition; and when I shall see them thus express their love and desire of the salvation of their souls by the infliction of torments and exercise of all manner of cruelties. For if it be out of a principle of charity, as they pretend, and love to men's souls that they deprive them of their estates, maim them with corporal punishments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and in the end even take away their lives — I say, if all this be done merely to make men Christians and procure their salvation, why then do they suffer whoredom, fraud, malice, and such-like enormities, which… manifestly relish of heathenish corruption, to predominate so much and abound amongst their flocks and people?

Neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible except to God alone.

Randolph Bourne … one of the towering public intellectual figures between 1907 and 1918 … wrote a famous essay called ‘The War and the Intellectuals’ … and he says, ‘Idealism should be kept for what is ideal.’ Think about that. Idealism should be kept for what is ideal!

It seems to me that what Randolph Bourne is getting at … is that idealism is not boosterism, just as critique is not castigation. But idealism is a bold and defiant highlighting of hypocrisy …. It is a self-critical and self-correcting procedure.

Hypocrisy can be found in high places of the powerful as well as in places of the powerless. … It cuts both ways. I think this is precisely what Malcolm X had in mind when he provided his technical definition of what a nigger was. Do you recall what he said? He said, ‘a nigger is a victim of American democracy.’ And note the oxymoronic character and self-contradictory character of this formulation.

How could there be a victim of American democracy? Because you point out the hypocrisy and how hypocrisy becomes institutionalized and legalized and you end up with a kind of herrenvolk democracy which, of course, in many ways was the case in the USA until the 1950s.