Quotes about deformation (119 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 310.
Context: Fascism is a deformity of capitalism. It heightens the imperialist tendency towards domination which is inherent in capitalism, and it safeguards the principle of private property. At the same time, fascism immeasurably strengthens the institutional racism already bred by capitalism, whether it be against Jews (as in Hitler’s case) or against African peoples (as in the ideology of Portugal’s Salazar and the leaders of South Africa). Fascism reverses the political gains of the bourgeois democratic system such as free elections, equality before the law, parliaments; and it also extolls authoritarianism and the reactionary union of the church with the state. In Portugal and Spain, it was the Catholic church—in South Africa, it was the Dutch Reformed church.

“In nature there's no blemish but the mind.
None can be called deformed but the unkind.”

William Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Source: Twelfth Night

Nature

“Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Intelligence

“In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 375
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Em qualquer espírito, que não seja disforme, existe a crença em Deus. Em qualquer espírito, que não seja disforme, não existe crença em um Deus definido.

God

“[Intelligence services] are poor pigs suffering from two mental illnesses: The one disease is because they never get public recognition for what they actually do. This is inevitable, as they have to work in secret. This deformes the soul. The other disease bases on the fact that they have the tendency to believe they understood the national interests of their own country much better than their own government. This latter disease is the reason that I do not trust them.”

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) Chancellor of West Germany 1974-1982

DIE ZEIT, 30. August 2007, Zeit.de http://www.zeit.de/2007/36/Interview-Helmut-Schmidt?page=all

Secret , Disease , Soul , Intelligence

“Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.”

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian pedagogue, philosopher and physician

Source: The Discovery of the Child (1948), Ch. 1

Soul

“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing — a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U. N., the financial collapse of New York. We can't avoid being politicized (a word as murky as the condition which it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so large and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature itself is heavily "politicized."”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976) [Viking/Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0-141-18075-7], p. 21
General sources

Literature , Reality , Study

“Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America … We argued that is was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves — and yet it prescribed no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.
We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.
We thought it was more likely, though, that their framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves of composing new families. Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.
Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful family of elected representatives — which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.
Eliza and I … proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble, or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slapstick

Source: Slapstick (1976), Ch. 6

People , World , Family , Beauty

“The new electoral system gives us a powerful tool to improve the work of the entire Soviet system, in order to eliminate bureaucratic phenomena, shortcomings and deformations in Soviet organizations. And these shortcomings are, as you know, very real. Our Party organizations must be prepared for the election campaign. In the elections, they must deal with hostile propaganda and hostile candidates.”

Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948) Soviet politician

Zhdanov in 1937. Translated from Swedish in the article Om socialismens demokratiska erfarenheter http://www.kommunisterna.org/politik/texter/socialismens-lardomar/om-socialismens-demokratiska-erfarenheter by Anders Carlsson.

Hostility

“What was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster in Ch. 13
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: What was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!

Men , Money , Nature

“Whoso loves beauty is unable for that very reason to love deformity.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Quo Vadis

Petronius, Ch. 72
Quo Vadis (1895)
Context: Whoso loves beauty is unable for that very reason to love deformity. One may not believe in our gods, but it is possible to love them...

Love , Beauty

“Political irrationalism which infests, deforms and destroys our lives, is — in the strictly psychiatric sense — a perversion of social life, caused by the ostracizing of the natural life functions and by their exclusion from the determination of social life.”

Wilhelm Reich book The Mass Psychology of Fascism

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Ch. 10 : Work Democracy

Sense , Life , Nature

“The Dude just pounded his way in a straight line, convinced that the lion was a figment of his imagination and that the vampire ahead of him was just Grendel's deformed mutant brother.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Gifts

Way , Imagination

“Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Home

“Kate had never in her life seen such frightful deformities, and the goblins had never seen such a hideous dress.”

Clare B. Dunkle book The Hollow Kingdom

Source: The Hollow Kingdom

Life

“That’s us,” he said. “Those five nuts right there.”
Which one is me?” I asked.
The little deformed one,” Zoe suggested.
Oh, shut up.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Variant: That's us," he said. "Those five nuts right there."

"Which one is me?" I asked.

"The little deformed one," Zoe suggested.

"Oh, shut up.
Source: The Titan's Curse

“I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Pleasure , Solitude , Appearance , Dead

“He could not stand. It was not
That he could not thrive, he was born
With everything but the will –
That can be deformed, just like a limb.
Death was more interesting to him.
Life could not get his attention.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Life , Death

“Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.”

Florence King (1936–2016) American writer

Source: Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady

“We prefer to go deformed and distorted all our lives rather than not resemble the portrait of ourselves which we ourselves have first drawn. It’s absurd. We run the risk of warping what’s best in us”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Source: Strait is the Gate and The Vatican Cellars

“I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Beauty , Imagination , Nature

“The ‘novel’ is a publishing convention that deforms the story. If more attention were given to form there would be fewer novels and better stories. There's no reason a publisher can’t put out a story that's a hundred or even seventy pages long. But a publisher will look at a story like that as defective novel, ineligible for shortlists. It should be in a collection. Or pumped full of air, turned into a novel… It's a pity. You see some good writers behaving like performing monkeys.”

Philip Ó Ceallaigh (1968) Irish writer

Interview by Tom Vowler (2010-13)

“I know it all —
All ye would ask. But ne'er shall hope be mine
Till the dread secret works its fatal will
In daylight visible, with wrath and scorn,
And ceaseless memory of forgotten things.
Then Jove shall learn what all his sulphurous bolts,
Soul-piercing torments, earthquakes, fiery plagues,
Disease, and loathsome, black deformity,
And all confounding shame, shall ne'er persuade
My voice to utter.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Prometheus
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Secret , Disease , Hope , Soul

“He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Moore’s Life of Lord Byron (1830)

Love

“I am primarily painting from photographs these days (from illustrated magazines but also from family photos), in a sense this is a stylistic problem, the form is naturalistic, even though the photograph is not nature at all but a prefabricated product (the “second-hand world” in which we live), I do not have to intervene artistically with style, since the stylization (deformation in form and color) contributes only under very particular circumstances toward clarifying and intensifying an object or a subject (generally stylization becomes the central problem which obscures everything else (object, subject), it leads to an unmotivated artificiality, an untouchable formalist taboo.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

In Richter's letters from Düsseldorf, 19 July 1963 - to two artist friends, Helmut and Erika Heinze
1960's

World , Family , Color , Photo

“[S]tresses in one direction produce not only a deformation along this direction but also transversally, the relation of both being expressed by the so-called Poisson ratio. However, the consideration… is of no great importance for the first, approximate judgement.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

“Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 6
The Mansion (1959)

Dogs , Light , Evil , Personality

“Three grossly different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abominations of the body - the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, homosexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behaviour. Finally there are the tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family.”

Erving Goffman book Stigma

Source: 1950s-1960s, Stigma, 1963, p. 13

Alcohol , Family , Religion , Suicide

“It seems obvious that Pollock is committed to the Marxist theory linking literary works and political power. He wants to deploy it as his lens for analysing how the aesthetic use of languages in India became interwoven into the fabric of politics. At a deeper level, beyond the aesthetic and political usage of Sanskrit, he finds that old Marxist demon: theology. For him, as for most Marxist-oriented scholars, all forms of spirituality/transcendence are, in effect, irrational, deformed and mystified ways of thinking….”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Way , Thinking

“Academic writing excuses itself from rhetorical care in the selfless service of some precise truth—and then deforms our only means for speaking truth.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Christian Rhetoric: Scraps for a Manifesto

Truth

“I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)

Law , Behavior , Nature

“Proof that the penis is a much later development than the female vulva is found in the evidence that the male himself was a late mutation from an original female creature. For man is but an imperfect female. Geneticists and physiologists tell us that the Y chromosome that produces males is a deformed and broken X chromosome — the female chromosome. All women have two X chromosomes, while the male has one X derived from his mother and one Y from his father. It seems very logical that this small and twisted Y chromosome is a genetic error — an accident of nature, and that originally there was only one sex — the female.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex, ch. 1 - Woman and the Second Sex (1971).

Women , Sex , Error , Nature

“As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures … our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

People , Fear , School , Family

“At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of sick, weak, deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As translated in Hitler's Secret Book (1961) Grove Press edition, pp. 8-9, 17-18
1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)

Life , Children , Truth , Birth

“.. without any deformation caused by the silly fashion of the corset... she stands somewhat uneasily, with her arms out and knees bent, as if she is balancing. Shadows play over her body and highlight her womanly figure.”

Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966) German artist

c. 1906; as quoted in Ernst Kirchner's Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury, and Immorality in Berlin, 1913 - 1916, Simmons, Sherwin, in 'The Art Bulletin', Vol. 82, No. 1. March 2000, p. 121
Bleyl stated that he favored this model Isabella due to her natural body. Using only two tones of yellow in the poster, Bleyl was able to impart a clear sense of this woman's physique. It is precisely this that got Bleyl in trouble: the police censored this image because they saw pubic hair in the shadow below the belly, apparently giving it an inappropriate sexual power

Fashion

“Now, to the great artist, everything in nature has character; for the unswerving directness of his observation searches out the hidden meaning of all things. And that which is considered ugly in nature often presents more character than that which is termed beautiful, because in the contractions of a sickly countenance, in the lines of a vicious face, in all deformity, in all decay, the inner truth shines forth more clearly than in features that are regular and healthy.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. II. To the artist, all in nature is beautiful, p. 46

Truth , Beauty , Search , Nature

“Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation building is not an Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan tradition. It is not a Republican tradition. It is a Bush II-neocon deformity, an aberration that proved disastrous for the United States and the Middle East.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"At Last, America First!" https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/at-last-america-first/ (April 29, 2016), Chronicles
2010s

“Do not be anxious about [an ordered painting] 'La Ferme' my dear Mr. Hartmann, I am anxious to establish in this picture such a decision deformed, that it may exist, independently of the caprices of the light, and of the influence of the hours of the day. I am regulating it, absolutely as a watchmaker regulates a watch after he has finished it.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

In a letter to Mr. Hartmann, c. 1865; as quoted in The Painters of Barbizon I – Millet, Rousseau and Diaz, by John W. Mollett, B.A.; publ. Sampton Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, Limited, London, 1890, p. 81
Mr. Hartmann, who had bought this and two other pictures had waited for them fifteen years, at last became impatient, and wrote Rousseau: 'I shall only enjoy my pictures in my extreme old age, when I shall have become too blind to see them'. his biographer/friend Alfred Sensier wrote: this seemed to Mr. Hartmann 'as the reasoning of a troubled mind.' https://archive.org/details/souvenirssurthr00sensgoog?q=Theodore+Rousseau
1851 - 1867

Decision , Light , Painting

“At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a Carousel slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 106

Change

“The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety. In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

Way

“My blog is an extension of my thinking. Why should I deform my thinking simply because I live under a government that espouses an ideology which I believe to be totally against humanity?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2008

Thinking

“Jabir reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, went through the market with people on both sides of him. He passed the dead body of a deformed sheep, took it by its ear and then said, "Which of you would like to have this for a dirham?" They said, "We would not like to have it for anything. What would we do with it?" He said, "Would you like to have it?" They said, "By Allah, even if it was alive, it would be defective since it is deformed, and now it is dead."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

He said, "By Allah, this world has less value with Allah than this has with you."
Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, 464 https://bewley.virtualave.net/riyad3.html
Sunni Hadith

People , World , Peace , Dead

“Modesty enables physical deformity.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

“Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part (as the Scripture saith) void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Deformity
Essays (1625)

Revenge , Nature , Parting , Personality

“It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate … Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.”

Toby Young (1963) British journalist

The Oxford Myth (1988)
Source: Toby Young quotes on breasts, eugenics and working-class people, Belam, Martin, 2018-01-03, The Guardian, 2018-01-03, en-GB, 0261-3077 http://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/03/toby-young-quotes-on-breasts-eugenics-and-working-class-people,

Children , Home

“Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As translated by Arthur Imerti (1964)
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584)

Change

“What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that history cannot become a science until it finds the technical terminology adequate to the correct characterization of its objects of study, in the way that physics did in the calculus and chemistry did in the periodic tables. Such is the recommendation of Marxists, Positivists, Cliometricians, and so on. Others will continue to insist that the integrity of historiography depends on its use of ordinary language, its avoidance of jargon. These latter suppose that ordinary language is a safeguard against ideological deformations of the ‘facts.’ What they fail to recognize is that ordinary language itself has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Way , History , Study , Science

“If I had not become a painter,
I would surely have become a clown..
.. because I make people laugh..
.. Faces deformed
by suffering, humour or work.
Often crazy. They then became imaginary,
when I adorned them with movements
free colours depending on the head. The
colour too become clown-like”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

AF, 73; p. 161
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

People , Suffering , Dependency

“The sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds, even while their general discourse is the same … In all matters of opinion and science, the case is opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance.”

David Hume book Four Dissertations

Four Dissertations (1757)

Men , Lie , Beauty , Reality

“There is something quite startling in the law that will gladden the hearts of eugenicists, who are considerable in number -- though many are still in the closet. The section on Abortion Procedures declares that the state is not permitted to interfere -- at any stage -- in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy if "the fetus is affected by genetic defect or serious deformity or abnormality."”

Nat Hentoff (1925–2017) American music critic

The Specter Of Pro-Choice Eugenics http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/hentoff_eugenics.html (May 25, 1991)

Law , Decision , Heart

“There is hardly any bodily blemish which a winning behaviour will not conceal, or make tolerable; and there is no external grace which ill-nature or affectation will not deform.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Nature

“The battle between Good and Evil is a theme of much of fantasy. But I think the battle between Good and Evil is fought largely within the individual human heart, by the decisions that we make. It’s not like evil dresses up in black clothing and you know, they’re really ugly. These are some of the things that Tolkien did; he made them work fabulously, but in the hands of his imitators, they become total clichés. I mean the orc-like creatures who always do dress in black and… they’re really ugly and they’ve got facial deformities or something. You can tell that if somebody’s ugly, he must be evil. And then Tolkien’s heroes are all very attractive people and all that, of course, again this became cliché in the hands of the Tolkien imitators.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

"GRRM Interview Part 2: Fantasy and History", interview with TIME Entertainment http://entertainment.time.com/2011/04/18/grrm-interview-part-2-fantasy-and-history/ (18 April 2011)

People , Thinking , Decision , Evil

“Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man — the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings. … The value of words help to define the feeling itself. … The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Source: The Cult of Sincerity (1969), p. 16

Feeling , Failure , Memory , Help

“Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

The Portable Door (2003)

Love , Life , Death , Pleasure

“We all know what the negro has been as a slave. In this relation we have his experience of two hundred and fifty years before us, and can easily know the character and qualities he has developed and exhibited during this long and severe ordeal. In his new relation to his environments, we see him only in the twilight of twenty years of semi-freedom; for he has scarcely been free long enough to outgrow the marks of the lash on his back and the fetters on his limbs. He stands before us, today, physically, a maimed and mutilated man. His mother was lashed to agony before the birth of her babe, and the bitter anguish of the mother is seen in the countenance of her offspring. Slavery has twisted his limbs, shattered his feet, deformed his body and distorted his features. He remains black, but no longer comely. Sleeping on the dirt floor of the slave cabin in infancy, cold on one side and warm on the other, a forced circulation of blood on the one side and chilled and retarded circulation on the other, it has come to pass that he has not the vertical bearing of a perfect man. His lack of symmetry, caused by no fault of his own, creates a resistance to his progress which cannot well be overestimated, and should be taken into account, when measuring his speed in the new race of life upon which he has now entered.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Life , Birth , Sleep , Freedom

“What is it that is done to our children that their puberty should deform them? They have the joy of movement; they have an enterprising curiosity; they are ready for sensible self-denial; they dream ahead, and they have a faithful memory, and, above all, great compassion. […] The well-meaning educator who flatters and humours the young not only does a disservice to the community, but also damages the individual by depriving him of the opportunities of self-discovery.”

Kurt Hahn (1886–1974) German educator

Quoted by Donald McLachlan in Kurt Hahn: A Life Span in Education and Politics, ed. Herman Röhrs, 1966, tr. 1970, ISBN 0710068859, §1, p. 8.

Children , Education , Faith , Dreams

“[Witches] steal young children out of their cradles, ministerio dæmonum, and put deformed in their rooms, which we call changelings.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 1, subsection 3.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I

Children

“In the mind perfect intelligence flourished and reigned, uprightness attended as its companion, and all the senses were prepared and moulded for due obedience to reason; and in the body there was a suitable correspondence with this internal order. But now, although some obscure lineaments of that image are found remaining in us; yet are they so vitiated and maimed, that they may truly be said to be destroyed. For besides the deformity which everywhere appears unsightly, this evil also is added, that no part is free from the infection of sin.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Commentary on Genesis 1. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom01.vii.i.html, (1554)
Genesis (1554)

Intelligence , Sense , Appearance , Evil

“They really were living to be 900 years old, and there's a lot of biological reasons why they could do that. In the original creation, there was no genetic load. There were not deformed chromosomes, and they didn't suffer under the… You know, your gene code now is a copy off a copy off a copy off a copy who knows how many times of Adam. And the fact that it even works at all is pretty amazing. After all this copying process it's been through and plus the hostile environment, we, and the extra things we throw at it.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

Hostility , Suffering , Time

“Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book V
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

People

“So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation writ large. The top performers are comic-book caricatures of sexual allure. The prosthetic breasts and lifted buttocks and (no kidding) artificial cheekbones are nothing more than accentuations of a mentality that yields huge liposuction and collagen industries. The gynecologically explicit sexuality of Jenna, Jasmin, et al. seems more than anything like a Mad magazine spoof of the “smoldering” sexuality of Sharon Stone and Madonna and so many other mainstream iconettes. Not to mention the fact that the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems then to revel in that grotesquerie.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

"Big Red Son", p.29-30
Consider the Lobster (2007)

Books , Madness

“I started to introduce letters into my pictures [his first collage art]. These were forms which could not be deformed, because, being two-dimensional, they existed outside three-dimensional space; their inclusion in a picture allowed a distinction to be made between objects which were situated in space and those which belonged outside space”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

the letters
Source: posthumous quotes, Braque', (1968), p. 68

Art

“To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”

Steven Pressfield book The War of Art

Source: The War of Art (2002), p. 13

“A parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i. e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e. g., by not feeding it)? The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die.”

Murray N. Rothbard book The Ethics of Liberty

Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such "neglect" down to a minimum.
Children and rights, p. 100
The Ethics of Liberty (1982)

Children , Education , Law , Question

“I went to school like other children until I was about 11 or 12 years of age, when the greatest misfortune of my life occurred, namely — the death of my mother, peace to her, she was a good mother to me; after she died my father broke up his home and went to lodgings; unfortunately for me he married his landlady; henceforth I never had one moment's comfort, she having children of her own, and I not being so handsome as they, together with my deformity, she was the means of making my life a perfect misery; lame and deformed as I was, I ran, or rather walked away from home two or three times, but suppose father had some spark of parental feeling left, so he induced me to return home again.”

Joseph Merrick (1862–1890) English man with severe deformities

Autobiographical sideshow pamphlet

Life , Death , Children , Age

“An artist is only an artist thanks to his exquisite sense of beauty — a sense which provides him with intoxicating delights, but at the same time implying and including a sense, equally exquisite, of all deformity and disproportion.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Un artiste n'est un artiste que grâce à son sens exquis du beau, — sens qui lui procure des jouissances enivrantes, mais qui en même temps implique, enferme un sens également exquis de toute difformité et de toute disproportion.
XI: "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III," IV http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Edgar_Poe_III._Notes_nouvelles_sur_Edgar_Poe_%28L%E2%80%99Art_romantique%29#IV
L'art romantique (1869)

Beauty , Sense , Time

“But who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), p. 105

Change

“[Julian - disguised]
Oh, jealousy is but
A shadow cast from vanity, which lain
Would take the shape of love to hide its own
Selfish deformity!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Love , Jealousy , Selfishness

“Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness!
Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all
The wanton horrors of her bloody play;
Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless,
Shunning the light, and owning not its name,
Compelled by its deformity to screen
With flimsy veil of justice and of right
Its unattractive lineaments that scare
All save the brood of ignorance; at once
The cause and the effect of tyranny;
Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile;
Dead to all love but of its abjectness;
With heart impassive by more noble powers
Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame;
Despising its own miserable being,
Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

Love , Pleasure , Fear , Religion

“It remained difficult for me to understand how some people are simply born mentally deformed, lacking all the natural moral restraints and imagination which dictate the actions of most of us, however partially. Such creatures have learned from childhood to ape the appropriate sentiments when it suits them, to charm or bully their opponents, to agree to anything, to tell any lie and to pursue their own ends with implacable determination.
“Such men and women are the true aliens amongst you and it is ironic how frequently we come to rule you. We use your very best instincts and deepest emotions against you. We convince you that we alone can satisfy your need for security and comfort and then we drain you dry of everything save perpetual terror. Ha, ha, ha!””

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 389)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Women , Men , People , Lie

“The extreme moment of shock in battle presents in heightened and distorted form some of the distinctive characteristics of a whole society involved in war. These characteristics in turn represent a heightening and distortion of many of the traits of a social world cracked open by transformative politics. The threats to survival are immediate and shifting; no mode of association or activity can be held fixed if it stands as an obstacle to success. The existence of stable boundaries between passionate and calculating relationships disappears in the terror of the struggle. All settled ties and preconceptions shake or collapse under the weight of fear, violence, and surprise. What the experience of combat sharply diminishes is the sense of variety in the opportunities of self-expression and attachment, the value given to the bonds of community and to life itself, the chance for reflective withdrawal and for love. In all these ways, it is a deformed expression of the circumstance of society shaken up and restored to indefinition. Yet the features of this circumstance that the battle situation does share often suffice to make the boldest associative experiments seem acceptable in battle even if they depart sharply from the tenor of life in the surrounding society. Vanguardist warfare is the extreme case. It is the response of unprejudiced intelligence and organized collaboration to violence and contingency.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 160

Love , Life , War , World

“It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Quia Imperfectum (1920)
And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

Law , Nature

“In the society of Jesus’s time, physical illness was typically construed as a curse, and in many cases sickness or deformity prevented one from participating fully in the life of the community, especially in common worship. Curing the blind, the deaf, the lame, and the leprous, Jesus was Yahweh binding up the wounds of his people and restoring them to communion.”

Robert Barron (bishop) (1959) priest of the Roman Catholic Church, author, scholar and Catholic evangelist.

Father Barron, Robert. Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith (Kindle Locations 246-249). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Life , People , Communication , Time

“Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mould. Any new-model humanity will only reproduce the familiar deformities of its designers. It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to the normal madness.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Truth and Consequences (p. 28)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Science , Madness

“Of the two classes of people, I hardly know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to distinguish themselves from the vulgar. … True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity, instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it. … Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority; nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse and homely.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Vulgarity and Affectation"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

People , Fear , Home

“The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticisms, fancies and falsehoods, have caricatured them into forms so monstrous and inconceivable, as to shock reasonable thinkers. … Happy in the prospect of a restoration of primitive Christianity, I must leave to younger athletes to encounter and lop off the false branches which have been engrafted into it by the mythologists of the middle and modern ages.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1853-1854), edited by H. A. Washington, Vol. 7, pp. 210, 257
Posthumous publications

Age , Religion , Falseness , Happiness

“Because of the effects of sin, mistakes have added up in the genes of humans so that today, deformities could result from close relatives marrying. Adam and Eve's children would have had relatively few mistakes in the genes compared to today. So, provided it was one man for one woman for life - there would not have been a problem at all for Cain to marry his sister!”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Adam have a Bellybutton?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2000)

Life , Children , Problem , Sister

“I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful.
The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art.
In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Men , People , Health , Truth

“Where was her bloom! These deadly and blood-suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and ecstatic tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream that meandered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid stains and this hideous deformity. Alas! These were the traces of agony; the grip of the assassin had been here!”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Love

“Ashamed of the many Frailties they feel within, all Men endeavour to hide themselves, their Ugly Nakedness, from each other, and wrapping up the true Motives of their Hearts in the Specious Cloke of Sociableness, and their Concern for the publick Good, they are in hopes of concealing their filthy Appetites and the Deformity of their Desires.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

Remark T, p. 262
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Men , Hope , Feeling , Motivation

“The finest virtues can become deformed with age. The precise mind becomes finicky; the thrifty man, miserly; the cautious man, timorous; the man of imagination, fanciful. Even perseverance ends up in a sort of stupidity. Just as, on the other hand, being too willing to understand too many opinions, too diverse ways of seeing, constancy is lost and the mind goes astray in a restless fickleness.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” p. 324
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Age , Stupidity , Way , Imagination

“I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, …”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

People , Way , Feeling , Problem

“Not unlike the bear which bringeth forth
In the end of thirty dayes a shapeless birth;
But after licking, it in shape she drawes,
And by degrees she fashions out the pawes,
The head, and neck, and finally doth bring
To a perfect beast that first deformed thing.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, First Day. Compare: "I had not time to lick it into form, as a bear doth her young ones", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy. Democritus to the Reader.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

Fashion , Birth , Drawing , Perfection

“… contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 56.

Parting

“This is my wedding day! The day I marry Emmanuel! And the word "wedding," which she had always linked the happiness, now seemed austere, distressing, full of snares and revelations. She saw her mother, heavy and moving with difficulty. A vision of herself as a victim of the same deformity was vivid in her mind.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 342

Wedding , Happiness

“Although Fox's private character was deformed by indulgence in vicious pleasures, it was in the eyes of his contemporaries largely redeemed by the sweetness of his disposition, the buoyancy of his spirits, and the unselfishness of his conduct. As a politician he had liberal sentiments, and hated oppression and religious intolerance. He constantly opposed the influence of the crown, and, although he committed many mistakes, and had in George III an opponent of considerable knowledge of kingcraft and immense resources, the struggle between him and the king, as far as the two men were concerned, was after all a drawn game…the coalition of 1783 shows that he failed to appreciate the importance of political principles and was ignorant of political science…Although his speeches are full of common sense, he made serious mistakes on some critical occasions, such as were the struggle of 1783–4, and the dispute about the regency in 1788. The line that he took with reference to the war with France, his idea that the Treason and Sedition bills were destructive of the constitution, and his opinion in 1801 that the House of Commons would soon cease to be of any weight, are instances of his want of political insight. The violence of his language constantly stood in his way; in the earlier period of his career it gave him a character for levity; later on it made his coalition with North appear especially reprehensible, and in his latter years afforded fair cause for the bitterness of his opponents. The circumstances of his private life helped to weaken his position in public estimation. He twice brought his followers to the brink of ruin and utterly broke up the whig party. He constantly shocked the feelings of his countrymen, and ‘failed signally during a long public life in winning the confidence of the nation’ (LECKY, Hist. iii. 465 sq). With the exception of the Libel Bill of 1792, the credit of which must be shared with others, he left comparatively little mark on the history of national progress. Great as his talents were in debate, he was deficient in statesmanship and in some of the qualities most essential to a good party leader.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

William Hunt, 'Fox, Charles James (1749–1806)', Dictionary of National Biography (1889).
About

Life , Men , Hate , War

“I want my street to be crazy, I want my avenues, shops and buildings, to enter into a crazy dance, and this is why I deform and distort their outlines and colours. However I always come up against the same difficulty, that if all the elements were one by one deformed and distorted excessively, if in the end nothing remained of their real outlines, I would have totally effaced the location that I intended to suggest, that I wished to transform.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 483

Dance

“Today, more than ever, women are occupying positions of influence. However, in the past they have been the exceptions to the rule and were usually obliged to hold on to their power by deforming themselves into honorary men or into magnified archetypes of the female who manipulated men. It still is not clear that women can successfully become part of the established structures without accepting these deformations.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Women , Men , Past , Parting

“… because man has been created in God’s image, sin is not natural. Sin is the deformation of man, it is a cancer, it is a sickness unto death which has infected man.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

Death , God , Nature

“Like left-liberals, "lite libertarians"—they're the kind that is afflicted with the same spineless conformity; a deformation of the personality euphemized as political correctness—are incapable of appreciating a script or book; a painting or symphony; a stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violates the received laws of political correctness.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

ILANA MERCER, " "Cathy Reisenwitz Redux: Steigerwald, Oy Vey Gevalt!" https://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/01/14/ilana-mercer-cathy-reisenwitz-redux-steigerwald-oy-gevalt/ The British Libertarian Alliance, January 14, 2015
2010s, 2015

Books , Law , Affliction , Painting

“The hypocrite, among other things, can be a deformed ambassador of the truth.”

James Wood (1965) literary critic

The Irresponsible Self (2004)

Truth