Quotes about pit (227 quotes, page 3) | Quotes of famous people

“Islam is wrong! It is a heresy from the pit of Hell. Mormonism is wrong! It is a heresy from the pit of Hell.”

Robert Jeffress (1955) Pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas

Values Voter Summit, , quoted in
Context: I think part of the problem is we're in this consumer mentality as a church where we have the idea that our job is to build as big of a church as we possibly can. And if we get into that idea and fall into that trap, then we say then we can't say anything that's going to offend people. Why, if we preach that homosexuality is an abomination to God, we better not preach that because that's going to offend the gays or people who know gay people. If we tell people what the Bible says, that every other religion in the world is wrong: Islam is wrong! It is a heresy from the pit of Hell. Mormonism is wrong! It is a heresy from the pit of Hell. Judaism, you can't be saved being a Jew, you know who said that by the way? The three greatest Jews in the New Testament: Peter, Paul, and Jesus Christ. They all said Judaism won't do it, it's faith in Jesus Christ.

Hell

“The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Source: Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, p. 89
Context: But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

Soul , Imagination , Universe

“He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit.”

Nelson Algren book The Man with the Golden Arm

Frankie Machine above the Club Safari, where drug is sold.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)
Context: The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie's Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies' dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood. / Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. [... ] He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of [an addict]'s terrible pit.

World , Color , Way

“To legislation… the Puritans resorted. Instead of guiding, they repressed, and thus pitted themselves against the unconquerable impulses of human nature. Believing that nature to be depraved, they felt themselves logically warranted in putting it in irons. But they failed; and their failure ought to be a warning to their successors.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

New Fragments (1892)
Context: To legislation... the Puritans resorted. Instead of guiding, they repressed, and thus pitted themselves against the unconquerable impulses of human nature. Believing that nature to be depraved, they felt themselves logically warranted in putting it in irons. But they failed; and their failure ought to be a warning to their successors.<!--p.34

Failure , Nature

“I count my blessings for the fact I don't have to go into that pit that John Major stands in, nose-to-nose with the opposition, all yelling at each other.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

When asked about the US system of government compared to parliamentary systems.

Context: I think it's good, stable system. And, you know, dealer's choice. Let them choose what they want for their system, I'm not going to criticize the British or the Australians or anybody else. But, we've got a stable system, in the sense of presidential leadership, continuity, and I wouldn't trade it at all. And besides that, I count my blessings for the fact I don't have to go into that pit that John Major stands in, nose-to-nose with the opposition, all yelling at each other. He and I have talked about that, incidentally. I think he does very, very well. But I think that's for him, not for me.

“Evil lives in a pit. If you want to fight it, you must climb down into the slime to do so.”

David Gemmell book The King Beyond the Gate

White cloaks show the dirt more thank black, and silver tarnishes.
Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 10

Evil , Fight

“In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

Page 437 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA437. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. <span class="plainlinks"> 21 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p21– 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22</span>.
"Youth" (1912), II
Context: In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.

Youth

“This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats
The herd back to the pit of being.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Knight, Death and the Devil," lines 17-20
The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
Context: His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring
That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity —
This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats
The herd back to the pit of being.

“The current regime is trumping the Shiite-Sunni card, pitting national minorities at each other’s throat. However Iran is a country which for centuries accorded welcome to people of different nationalities and faiths. So when we come to power, national minorities will have their rights guaranteed. The present regime creates too many complexities like terrorism, economic instability, nuclear menace, extremism. When it clears the stage, 90 percent of world problems will be resolved.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted by Nadezhda Popova, Reza Pahalavi, Son Of The Last Shah Of Iran: “No War Is Needed – We Will Topple This Regime Ourselves” http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=22&page=6, Izvetsiya, May 29, 2006.
Interviews, 2006

People , World , Faith , Problem

“When I was writing it, I was remembering how hard it was to be a 16-year-old in high school. I always wanted to be an artist, so I was this loner kid who just got drunk all the time. I only had one real friend. There was a girl I really liked, and she ended up taking really sleazy photographs with her boyfriend, and that really crushed me, I was just swimming in this pit of despair, jealousy and alcoholism.”

Джерард Артур Уэй (1977)

Alcohol , Jealousy , School , Girl

“The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.”

Jan Neruda (1834–1891) Czech poet, theater reviewer, publicist and writer

Light , Sun , Time , Dead

“When we look back over the course of our nation’s history, what we see again and again almost like clockwork are these predictable efforts by the wealthy elite to use race as a wedge. To pit poor whites against poor people of color for the benefit of the ruling elite. Many people don’t realize that even slavery as an institution—the emergence of an all-Black system of slavery—was to a large extent the result of plantation owners deliberately trying to pit poor whites against poor Blacks. And ensure that poor whites would not join in any kind of resistance, movement, struggle, or revolt with poor Blacks…”

Michelle Alexander (1967) American lawyer, civil rights activist and writer

On the elite’s influence on the poor in in “The struggle for racial justice has a long way to go” https://isreview.org/issue/84/struggle-racial-justice-has-long-way-go in the International Socialist Review (May 2012)

Color , People , History , Effort

“Witzel starts out with the intention of pitting the linguistic evidence of place-names and river-names against the evidence of archaeology; and he ends up having to try and argue against, or explain away, this linguistic evidence, since it only confirms the archaeological evidence.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 7 : The Indo-European Homeland

“Time seemed stationary, yet the painful pressure of time was constantly felt. If only the pressure would crush the life out of him and allow him simply to sink into the inviting movement of clock hands or feel the passing of time he could then feel he was getting closer to something or at least further away from something, it didnt really matter which. Nothing really mattered. If only there were some kind of movement. But everything remained motionless, the body not even moving on the bed, while feeling the tearing pressures from all sides in all directions. Feeling deep within him in that pit where there lived the violent and contorting pain of maggots crawling through your guts between the rusty cans and broken bottles and the screaming urgency to get time to move, to just move before every FUCKING GODDAMN PART OF YOUR BODY SCREWS UP INTO A FUCKING BALL AND YOUR WHOLE FUCKING BODY DISINTEGRATES, JUST SHATTERS and there was no escape, even with the lack consciousness, for with it came dreams of wakefulness. There was no escape from the past. The struggle against it only entangled him deeper in the fear of the future. There was no place for him to go. No place he could hide. No place where his enemy didnt exist. No escape from unconscious wakefulness. There was no rest.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Fear , Pain , Time , Past

“Nobody associated with Sahodarakal is really willing to disclose what camera wizardry it was that finally transformed Kamalahasan into a fascinating midget. Some of the dwarf scenes were shot in a circus playing in Cochin by digging a pit with the actor standing knee-deep in it. The shoes were fixed to his knee and the pit was covered with a carpet.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Ramesh Menon, in “Comeback king (31May 1989)”

Shoe

“There is a streak of cruelty <…> that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills. A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog's tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive. <…> The Aztecs <…> cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.”

Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) American writer, journalist

Из малой прозы

Pain , History , Dogs , Heart

“Against the new leviathan, whether in the guise of universal suffrage, democracy, or of an equally fraudulent triumphant proletariat, [Kierkegaard] pitted the individual human soul made in the image of a God who was concerned about the fate of every living creature. In contrast with the notion of salvation through power, he held out the hope of salvation through suffering. The Cross against the ballot box or the clenched fist; the solitary pilgrim against the slogan-shouting mob; the crucified Christ against the demagogue-dictators promising a kingdom of heaven on earth, whether achieved through endlessly expanding wealth and material well-being, or through the ever greater concentration of power and its ever more ruthless exercise.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

The Oddest Prophet – Søren Kierkegaard by Malcolm Muggeridge

Democracy , Soul , God , Fate

“Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?”

William Blake The Book of Thel

The Book of Thel, Thel's Motto (1789–1792)
1780s

Love , Making love , Wisdom

“Nostalgia is a fruit with the pain of distance in its pit.”

Giannina Braschi (1953) Puerto Rican writer

Assault on Time, 1981.

Nostalgia , Pain

“Look—I understand that many of my fellow Americans view the future with fear and trepidation. I understand they worry about their jobs. I understand like my dad, they lay in bed wondering, can I keep my health care, can I pay my mortgage. Thinking about their families, about what comes next. I promise you, I get it.But the answer is not to turn inward, to retreat into competing factions, distrusting those who don′t look like you or worship the way you do or don′t get their news from the same source as you do. We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal. We can do this if we open our souls instead of hardening our hearts.If we show a little tolerance and humility, and if we are willing to stand in the other person′s shoes—as my mom would say—just for a moment, stand in their shoes. Because here′s the thing about life: there′s no accounting for what fate will deal you.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2021, January, Presidential Inaugural Address (2021)

Family , Soul , Life , Understanding

“Racism is rare in Brazil. I'm fed up with this mania of always pitting blacks against whites, gays against heterosexuals. People say I'm homophobic, racist, fascist, xenophobic, but I won the election. [...] If I was racist, what would I have done on seeing a black fall into the water? I'd have folded my arms.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

In an interview to Luciana Gimenez broadcasted on 7 May 2019. Racism 'rare' in Brazil, says far right Bolsonaro https://www.france24.com/en/20190508-racism-rare-brazil-says-far-right-bolsonaro. France 24 (8 May 2019).
2019

Water , People

“Chaos Isn't A Pit. Chaos Is A Ladder.”

movie Game of Thrones

Character Petyr Baelish, Littlefinger