Quotes

Quotes about Malice


As for the brandy, "nothing extenuate"; and the water, put nought in in malice.

Douglas Jerrold

A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.

Logan Pearsall Smith

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

Eric Hoffer

Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.

Paul Goodman

Malice drinks one half of its own poison.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.

Eric Hoffer

Add a few drops of malice to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.

Eric Hoffer

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

Eric Hoffer

It is not sheer malice that pricks our ears to evil reports about our fellow men. For there are frequent moments when we feel lower than the lowest of mankind, and this opinion of ourselves isolates us. Hence the rumor that all flesh is base comes almost as a message of hope. It breaks down the wall that has kept us apart, and we feel one with humanity.

Eric Hoffer

Laughter to begin with was probably glee at the misfortunes of others. The baring of the teeth in laughter hints at its savage ancestry. Animals have no malice, hence also no laughter. They never savor the sudden glory of Schadenfreude. It was its infectious quality that made of laughter a medium of mutuality.

Eric Hoffer

There is probably an element of malice in the readiness to overestimate people: we are laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.

Eric Hoffer

The weak are not a noble breed. Their sublime deeds of faith, daring, and self-sacrifice usually spring from questionable motives. The weak hate not wickedness but weakness; and one instance of their hatred of weakness is hatred of self. All the passionate pursuits of the weak are in some degree a striving to escape, blur, or disguise an unwanted self. It is a striving shot through with malice, envy, self-deception, and a host of petty impulses; yet it often culminates in superb achievements.

Eric Hoffer

Here's Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not so much brain as ear-wax; and the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother, the bull, the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cockolds; a thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brother's leg, to what form but that he is should wit larded with malice and malice forced with wit turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both ass and ox: to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass. To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without roe, I would not care; but to be Memelaus! I would conspire against destiny.

William Shakespeare

Should envious tongues some malice frame; to soil and tarnish your good name; Live it Down!

Henry Rink

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.

Abraham Lincoln

Men are more satirical from vanity than from malice.

Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

Eric Hoffer

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Iris Murdoch

Authors | Quotes | Digests | Submit | Interact | Store

Copyright © Classics Network. Contact Us