Quotes about stain
page 2

Jim Butcher photo

“Harry Dresden: Blood leaves no stain on a Warden's cloak.”

Source: The Dresden Files, Proven Guilty (2006), Chapter 1, Opening line

Sidney Lanier photo
Gerald Kaufman photo

“It is time to remind Sharon that the star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive Government. His actions are staining the star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, Mendelssohn and Mahler, Sergei Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps and now involved in killing Palestinians once again.”

Gerald Kaufman (1930–2017) British politician

Kaufman (April 2002) Speech to the House of Commons as cited in: Stuart Littlewood (14 january 2009). " Could the Rising Anger of British MPs Shake America’s Complacency?" http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=29784. Middle East Online. Retrieved on 18 january 2009.
This speech related to Israel's controversial military operation codenamed Defensive Wall

George Lippard photo
William Blake photo

“And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Introduction, st. 5
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Traci Lords photo

“You say you wake up
In the morning
Feeling used
Like a fallen angel
Tired and bruised
It's got you feeling
So insane
More dead than alive
Love's got you stained
On the inside”

Traci Lords (1968) American mainstream and pornographic actress, producer, film director, writer and singer

Fallen Angel, written by Traci Lords, Ben Watkins, and Johann Bley
Song lyrics, 1000 Fires (1995)

A. C. Dixon photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
William Cowper photo

“There is a fountain fill'd with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;
And sinners, plung'd beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

No. 79, "Praise for the Fountain Opened".
Olney Hymns (1779)

Robert M. Price photo

“I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Christ a Fiction, https://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html, 27 November 2016, 1997]

Robert Seymour Bridges photo

“Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,
With promise of strength and manhood full and fair!”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

On a Dead Child http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2930.html, st. 1 (1890).
Poetry

Ray Comfort photo
Charles Dickens photo

“Those of us who make a mark use someone else's blood.
Our western stain won't wash away; it won't vanish in the flood.”

" The Burning City Smoking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3YmL6Fc3K4," Put Your Ghost to Rest (2006)

James Dean Bradfield photo
Gustave Moreau photo
Septimius Severus photo

“You see by what has happened that we are superior to you in intelligence, in size of army, and in number of supporters. Surely you were easily trapped, captured without a struggle. It is in my power to do with you what I wish when I wish. Helpless and prostrate, you lie before us now, victims of our might. But if one looks for a punishment equal to the crimes you have committed, it is impossible to find a suitable one. You murdered your revered and benevolent old emperor, the man whom it was your sworn duty to protect. The empire of the Roman people, eternally respected, which our forefathers obtained by their valiant courage or inherited because of their noble birth, this empire you shamefully and disgracefully sold for silver as if it were your personal property. But you were unable to defend the man whom you yourselves had chosen as emperor. No, you betrayed him like the cowards you are. For these monstrous acts and crimes you deserve a thousand deaths, if one wished to do to you what you have earned. You see clearly what it is right you should suffer. But I will be merciful. I will not butcher you. My hands shall not do what your hands did. But I say that it is in no way fit or proper for you to continue to serve as the emperor's bodyguard, you who have violated your oath and stained your hands with the blood of your emperor and fellow Roman, betraying the trust placed in you and the security offered by your protection. Still, compassion leads me to spare your lives and your persons. But I order the soldiers who have you surrounded to cashier you, to strip off any military uniform or equipment you are wearing, and drive you off naked. 9. And I order you to get yourselves as far from the city of Rome as is humanly possible, and I promise you and I swear it on solemn oath and I proclaim it publicly that if any one of you is found within a hundred miles of Rome, he shall pay for it with his head.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book II.

George William Russell photo

“We are tired who follow after
Phantasy and truth that flies:
You with only look and laughter
Stain our hearts with richest dyes.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

“My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Memoirs, Falling Towards England (1985)

Phil Hartman photo
Robert Southey photo
J. M. Barrie photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo

“As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

To Otto von Bismarck in June 1878, as quoted in Around the World with General Grant http://www.granthomepage.com/grantslavery.htm (1879), by John Russell Young, The American News Company, New York, vol. 7, p. 416.
1870s, Around the World with General Grant (1879)

George William Russell photo

“I pitied one whose tattered dress
Was patched, and stained with dust and rain;
He smiled on me; I could not guess
The viewless spirit's wide domain.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Narendra Modi photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.
I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?… time has healed the wounds -- and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting -- ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.
Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham -- that city which some call "Bombingham" -- which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith.
Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Bill Bryson photo
Walter Scott photo

“If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.”

Irving Layton (1912–2006) Romanian-born Canadian poet

Obs II.
The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

Phillips Brooks photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Robert M. Price photo

“Is it …possible that beneath and behind the stained-glass curtain of Christian legend stands the dim figure of a historical founder of Christianity? Yes, it is possible, perhaps just a tad more likely than that there was a historical Moses, about as likely as there having been a historical Apollonius of Tyana. But it becomes almost arbitrary to think so.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Of Myth and Men: A Closer Look at the Originators of the Major Religions - What Did They Really Say and Do?, Free Inquiry magazine, December 31, 1999, 20, 1, http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php/articles/2756]

Robert Frost photo
Jeb Bush photo
Jeffrey Tucker photo
Silius Italicus photo

“That crystal river keeps its pools of blue water free from all stain above its shallow bed, and slowly draws along its fair stream of greenish hue. One would scarce believe it was moving; so softly along its shady banks, while the birds sing sweet in rivalry, it leads along in a shining flood its waters that tempt to sleep.”
Caeruleas Ticinus aquas et stagna uadoso perspicuus seruat turbari nescia fundo ac nitidum uiridi lente trahit amne liquorem. uix credas labi: ripis tam mitis opacis argutos inter uolucrum certamine cantus somniferam ducit lucenti gurgite lympham.

Book IV, lines 82–87
Punica

Quentin Crisp photo
Margaret Mead photo

“… Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother, whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things medieval, writes mystical poetry, reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seeking for the lost secret of medieval stained glass. Her mother's younger brother is an engineer, a strict materialist, who never recovered from reading Haeckel in his youth; he scorns art, believes that science will save the world, scoffs at everything that was said and thought before the nineteenth century, and ruins his health by experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much interested in Indian philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-participator in life, who in spite of her daughter's devotion to her will not make any move to enlist her enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl's own household. Add to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one another, becomes appalling.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 161

Billy Joel photo
Geert Wilders photo
Jean Toomer photo

“And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade”

Jean Toomer (1894–1967) American poet and novelist

from "Reapers"
Poems from Cane (1923)

Anthony Trollope photo

“Money is neither god nor devil, that it should make one noble and another vile. It is an accident, and if honestly possessed, may pass from you to me, or from me to you, without a stain.”

Ch. 72 http://books.google.com/books?id=Jy1MAAAAcAAJ&q=%22Money+is+neither+god+nor+devil+that+it+should+make+one+noble+and+another+vile+It+is+an+accident+and+if+honestly+possessed+may+pass+from+you+to+me+or+from+me+to+you+without+stain%22&pg=PA269#v=onepage, St. Paul's Magazine, April 1869 http://books.google.com/books?id=wkBJAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Money+is+neither+god+nor+devil+that+it+should+make+one+noble+and+another+vile+It+is+an+accident+and+if+honestly+possessed+may+pass+from+you+to+me+or+from+me+to+you+without+stain%22&pg=PA126#v=onepage
Phineas Finn (1869)

Samuel R. Delany photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis photo

“The ring was all blood-stained… so I put the ring on Jack's finger… and then I kissed his hand…”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

The "Camelot" interview (29 November 1963)

Laurence Hope photo

“Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheel,
Less than the rust that never stained thy sword”

Less Than the Dust
Indian Love Lyrics (aka Garden of Kama) (1901)

George Gordon Byron photo
Tim McGraw photo
Federico García Lorca photo

“Black are the horses.
The horseshoes are black.
On the dark capes glisten
stains of ink and wax.
Their skulls are leaden,
which is why they do not weep.
With their patent leather souls
they come down the street.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Los caballos negros son.
Las herraduras son negras.
Sobre las capas relucen
manchas de tinta y de cera.
Tienen, por eso no lloran,
de plomo las calaveras.
Con el alma de charol
vienen por la carretera.
" Romance de la Guardia Civil Española http://www.poesia-inter.net/index214.htm" from Primer Romancero Gitano (1928)

Robert M. Price photo
Margaret Junkin Preston photo

“With guilt's defilement stained, without, within,
How may I hope Thy cleansing grace to win?
Because Thou saidst, "I have forgiven thy sin."”

Margaret Junkin Preston (1820–1897) American writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 87.

Lil Wayne photo

“Wayne's getting money like Damon & Keenan. Try and take it from me and I'm aiming and beaming. Banging and leaving. Stains on the cement.”

Lil Wayne (1982) American rapper, singer, record executive and businessman

They Still Like Me
Official Mix tapes, Dedication 2 (2006)

William Blake photo
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi photo

“The stain of prejudice is often indelible.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: How to Argue and Win Every Time (1995), Ch. 6 : The Power of Prejudice : Examining the Garment, Bleaching the Stain, p. 92

Michael Swanwick photo
John Calvin photo

“We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vices are always bubbling up form it to bespatter and stain what is otherwise pure…. We should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only but are buried in innumerable impurities…. all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement…. they are always spattered and befouled with many stains…. it is certain that there is no one who is not covered with infinite filth.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

In John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, 1989, William J. Bouwsma, Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN 0195059514 ISBN 9780195059519, p. 36. http://books.google.com/books?id=ADdQiBaLW_kC&pg=PA36&dq=%22We+take+nothing+from+the+womb+but+pure+filth+%22&hl=en&ei=iu9lTJbUNsL48AbKt92DCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20take%20nothing%20from%20the%20womb%20but%20pure%20filth%20%22&f=false

Paul Simon photo
John Quincy Adams photo

“Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union… A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would now be certainly necessary… The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation.”

John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) American politician, 6th president of the United States (in office from 1825 to 1829)

Diary entry (1820), as quoted in The Diary of John Quincy Adams (1951), by John Quincy Adams, Scribner's Sons, New York, p. 228-229 http://web.archive.org/web/20130703084250/http://home.nas.com/lopresti/ps6.htm

Thomas Moore photo

“Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright,
Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

On the Death of Sheridan.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

William Ewart Gladstone photo
William Westmoreland photo

“I was tired of painting. So many collectors bought paintings and locked them in bank vaults. The stained-glass windows allowed me to make public art…. One day a woman stopped me in the street to talk to me about Champ-de-Mars metro station. "Whether it's sunny, rainy, or snowing, I love your stained-glass windows at Champ-de-Mars. Those big dancing shapes always warm my heart." That woman was neither a collector nor an art critic, but she understood the meaning I meant to give that work.”

Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001) Canadian artist

Original in French: J'étais dégoûtée de la peinture. Bon nombre de collectionneurs achetaient des tableaux pour les enfermer dans des voûtes de banques. Les verrières m'ont permis de faire de l'art public.... Un jour, une femme m'a abordée dans la rue pour me parler de la station de métro Champ-de-Mars. « Qu'il fasse beau, qu'il pleuve ou qu'il neige, j'adore vos verrières du Champ-de-Mars. Ces grandes formes qui dansent me font chaud au coeur. » Cette femme n'étaient ni une collectionneuse ni une critique d'art, mais elle avait compris le sens que j'avais voulu donner à cette oeuvre.
L'esquisse d'une mémoire, 1996

Pat Condell photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Josh Billings photo
Gene Wolfe photo

“She often spoke of marryin' a butcher or a sausage maker, having a liking for those trades, as she said, for they knew you couldn't never get all the stains from their aprons, and didn't demand it.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Our Neighbor by David Copperfield", Future Tense (1978), ed. Lee Harding, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989)
Fiction

George Henry Thomas photo
Mike Oldfield photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Bill Bryson photo

“I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy- five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in Masterpieces of World Painting to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of The New Yorker to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 36

William Cowper photo

“Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of his unrivall'd pencil.”

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 240.

Warren G. Harding photo

“Congress ought to wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly representative democracy.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Speech https://books.google.com/books?id=POhHuoGILNYC&pg=PA51 (12 April 1921).
1920s

Buddhaghosa photo

“Only virtue's water can
wash out the stain in living things.”

Buddhaghosa Indian writer

1.24, p. 13
The Path of Purification

Charles Brockden Brown photo
Joseph Hayne Rainey photo
George Bird Evans photo
Jeff Foxworthy photo
A. M. Klein photo
Jacoba van Heemskerck photo

“On the whole [the alignment of a series of stained glass windows with the interior of a villa in The Hague] I have thought about all the time... I want to focus more on the architecture of the interior in general and that should we do together [with architect Buys]... Now I was already thinking, the enormous color effect that the window will generate - and that will certainly become powerful - must be accompanied with strong colors - the hall -, otherwise the window itself will be too much isolated. For instance the staircase, could it be painted in strong colors and not [in] oak.... deep ultramarine blue or green, with a beautiful colorful carpet.... I feel I must make designs for carpets, to create in that way a beautiful unity with the stained glass as a whole.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands: Over het geheel [de afstemming van een serie aan Jacoba opgedragen glasramen met het interieur van een villa in Den Haag] heb ik steeds loopen denken.. ..ik wil mij veel meer op de architectuur van het binnenhuis in het algemeen toeleggen en dat moeten wij samen doen [met architect Buys].. .Nu heb ik al gedacht het enorme kleur-effekt dat het raam zal maken en dat zal zeker machtig werken, moet gedragen worden door sterke kleuren - de hal - anders staat het teveel alleen; zou de trap b.v. in de verf een sterke kleur kunnen krijgen en niet [in] eikenhout.. ..diep ultramarijn blauw of groen en dan een prachtige kleurige loper.. ..ik voel dat ik ontwerpen voor tapijten moet maken om zoo met het glas in lood een mooi geheel te hebben.
Quote in een brief van Jacoba aan architect J. Buys, 28 April 1920 in archief N.D.B., Amsterdam; as cited by Herbert Henkels, in Jacoba van Heemskerck, kunstenares van het Expressionisme, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 1982, p. 42
1920's

Wyndham Lewis photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo
John Muir photo
Ramakrishna photo

“If a white cloth is stained even with a small spot, the stain appears very ugly indeed. So the smallest fault of a holy man becomes painfully prominent.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 299

Adolphe Quetelet photo
Sri Chinmoy photo

“To deliberately criticise another individual may cause an indelible stain on the critic.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

#14805, Part 37
Twenty Seven Thousand Aspiration Plants Part 1-270 (1983)

Mickey Spillane photo
Christopher Moore photo