Epithet Quotes

Men’s thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.

In my opinion, using different kinds of epithets and adjectives in connection with the word democracy is a sign of mere hypocrisy, to put it mildly. Either there’s democracy, or there isn’t.

Fascist is not just an epithet. Fascist is a proper noun that means a specific thing. It`s a real thing. It`s not always referring to ancient history.

Insolence is not logic; epithets are the arguments of malice.

Here in the United States, when the term “fascist” gets used, it`s either talking about other countries, ancient history or it`s used as a sort of insult, right, a sort of generic right wing epithet that people use to criticize politicians who are at most on the edge of mainstream American political thought.

For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print.

A heap of epithets is poor praise: the praise lies in the facts, and in the way of telling them.

As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.

Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!

It’s easy to attack an artist as misogynist, but that’s really such a facile epithet. And if an artist is constantly worrying about how others will judge a work, it can end up being a block to investigating certain areas of human nature or certain truths about sexuality.

I really think next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing; and the epithet which I should covet the most next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred.

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .

A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.

The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic.

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.

If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse; there is no argument in an epithet.

Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.

Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.

Epithets are not arguments. Abuse does not persuade.

My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.

If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.

The infernal flag-waving after 9/11 nearly drove liberals out of their gourds. For the left, ‘flag-waving’ is an epithet.

The epithets of imbeciles have never bothered me.

I think that I can count on the fingers of one hand the times you’ve actually said the word ‘women’ and not replaced it with an epithet referring to female genitalia.” “Hey, he’s not that bad,” Warren said. “Sometimes he calls them cows or whores.

I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a <>.

The epithets of parent and child have been long applied to Great Britain and her colonies, [but] we rarely see anything from your side of the water except the authoritative style of a master to a school-boy.

Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist – these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd.

The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees.

What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary.

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

We lose in depth of expression when we go to inferior animals for comparisons with human beauty. Homer calls Juno ox-eyed; and the epithet suits well with the eyes of that goddess, because she may be supposed, with all her beauty, to want a certain humanity. Her large eyes look at you with a royal indifference.

For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is “grave and constant” (Joyce’s epithets) in the mystery of our condition.

Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

For other great mathematicians or philosophers, he [Gauss] used the epithets magnus, or clarus, or clarissimus; for Newton alone he kept the prefix summus.