Quotes about cesspool (18 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“So my life and the life of my family has been completely disrupted in absolutely every way. But it's been worth it. It's uncovered a vast cesspool of illegitimate economic and political power in which the Church is immersed right up to its ears, and I intend to dive in headfirst and pull it out of there dripping wet for all the world to see -- no matter how long it takes, no matter whose feet get stepped on in the process, no matter how much it costs, no matter how great the personal sacrifice.”

Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995) Atheist activist

"Playboy Interview: Madalyn Murray", Playboy (October 1965)

Life , World , Family , Way

“Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies, what corrupt police tactics, what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups trampling the nation under their boots, ramming back down their throats the people's cries for truth and justice, with the travesty of state security as a pretext.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

People , Truth , Justice

“I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.”

Bart D. Ehrman (1955) American academic

Source: God's Problem (2008), Ch. 1, p. 3

Life , God , People , World

“The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

World

“I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

Source: Early Writing

Age

“For Muslims, the season of and its reliance on God’s eternal power. It highlights the distance between Muslims and the cesspool of corruption, humiliation and tyranny that international oppressors and bullies impose on human communities…. Those who have reduced hajj to a religious-tourist trip and have hidden their enmity and malevolence towards the faithful and revolutionary people of Iran under the name of “politicizing hajj”, are themselves small and puny satans who tremble for fear of jeopardizing the interests of the Great Satan, the U. S.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

2016, Hajj hijacked by oppressors, Muslims should reconsider management of Hajj (September 2015)

God , People , Fear , Faith

“Look, Hollywood is a cesspool. The idea that Wienstein is alone, or even that conspicuous, I don’t think is true, I think this is pervasive behavior in Hollywood, and I think it does implicate the media. I think they’ve been complicit in it, I think businesses have been complicit in it.”

Ron DeSantis (1978) Florida politician

Rep. Ron DeSantis: Hollywood Sexual Misconduct Must Be ‘Thoroughly Investigated’ http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/11/02/ron-desantis-hollywood-sexual-misconduct-must-investigated/ (November 2, 2017)

Behavior , Idea , Business , Thinking

“Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The devil in the hills (1949), Chapter 18, p. 354

“If the slave-owner of our times has no slave, John, whom he can send to the cesspool, he has five shillings, of which hundreds of such Johns are in such need that the slave-owner of our times may choose any one out of hundreds of Johns and be a benefactor to him by giving him the preference, and allowing him, rather than another, to climb down into the cesspool.”

Leo Tolstoy book The Slavery of Our Times

Source: The Slavery of Our Times (1890), Chapter 8: Slavery Exists Among Us

Time

“Not for a long time shall we be able to know if President Johnson ever seriously thought of bringing about some of the reforms needed by his people — to iron out the barbed class contradictions that grow each day with explosive power. The truth is that the improvements announced under the pompous title of the "Great Society" have dropped into the cesspool of Vietnam.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

People , Truth , Time

“Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Women (1978)

Death , People , Appearance

“President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush.
How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)

People , World

“Trains, planes, cars, rockets, telescopes, tires, telephones, radios, television, electricity, atomic energy, computers, and fax machines. All miracles made possible by the minds and spirits of men with names like Ampere, Bell, Caselli, Edison, Ohm, Faraday, Einstein, Cohen, Teller, Shockley, Hertz, Marconi, Morse, Popov, Ford, Volta, Michelin, Dunlop, Watt, Diesel, Galileo, and other "dead white males." … The great majority of advancements past and present have been brought about by the genius and inventiveness of that most "despicable" of colors and genders, the dreaded white male, or, to be exact, by specific, individual white males. This is not to discredit the many contributions coming from nonwhites, but fact is fact. Our most important and consequential inventions have come almost exclusively from white males. … If you eliminate, suppress, or debase the while male, you kill the goose that laid the golden egg. If you ace him out with "affirmative" action, exile him from the family, teach him that he's a blight on mankind, then bon voyage to our society. We will devolve into a Third World cesspool. Where has there ever before in history been a group of human beings who have brought about the likes of the Magna Carta, the U. S. Constitution, and the countless life-saving and life-improving inventions that we now enjoy? … Does this mean we should sit back and let ourselves be governed by someone just because he's a white male? Of course, it doesn't. It means simply that we shouldn't suppress anyone, including white males. Let our God-given gifts run free in a free and just society, free from the oppression and tyranny of social engineers. If anyone has gifts beyond our own—be he a white male or other—be grateful. Maybe we have gifts that in some small way can contribute something of value as well. One way or another, we're all in the same boat. Few of us have truly outstanding gifts. And most of us have to humbly accept that there are others around who are more gifted than we are. In a Democratic society, it's not for Big Brother to decide who shall thrive and who shall struggle in the hive.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

Source: The Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders, Language and Culture (2003), pp. 136–138; "White Male Inventions" http://www.dadi.org/ms_dwm.htm (December 15, 1999)

Life , Men , God , World

“The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 103

World , Nostalgia

“You know, I go to Washington and I see all these politicians, and I see the swamp, and it's not a good place, in fact, today I said we ought to change it from the word 'swamp' to the word 'cesspool' or perhaps to the word 'sewer.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

But it's not good, not good.
2010s, 2017, July, 2017 National Scout Jamboree (July 24, 2017)

Change

“Watching Republicans in Washington is like watching lemmings, if lemmings jumped into cesspools instead of off cliffs. Splash! There goes Mark Foley!”

P. J. O'Rourke (1947) American journalist

"What's That Smell?" (23 October 2006)

“Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially until an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought, the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of pacifism with the greatest violence of all.”

Steven Best (1955) American activist

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 3 "The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of Militant Direct Action" (p. 78)

Life , Failure

“The human brain is evolution’s most magnificent disaster, a beautiful and glorious cesspool of brilliant analytical powers, infinite creativity, and pure madness.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Beauty , Madness