Embarrassment Quotes - page 7
Like my brothers who sit with me, I am extremely reluctant to decide anything except what is necessary for the special case, because I believe by long experience that judgments come with far more weight and gravity when they come upon points which the Judges are bound to decide, and I believe that obiter dicta, like the proverbial chickens of destiny, come home to roost sooner or later in a very uncomfortable way to the Judges who have uttered them, and are a great source of embarrassment in future cases. Therefore I abstain from putting a construction on more than it is necessary to do for this particular case.
Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen
Dissembling was the specialty of Broadway musicals. The storylines were scrupulously heterosexual. What could I have heard in them that made me think they explained me? It was this: The innocent characters were so wonderfully compromised by the actors who played them; by the writers and musicians who created them. The scar tissue on voices. The makeup on faces. Youth! The wicked stage! The jaded legend refreshed the innocence of my youth. Musical comedy songs were more real than my life because they were articulate and because they had ligaments of narrative attached to them. For today's young queers and lonelys, these songs must seem quaint and campy and not useful. But they were never campy for me-for us?-they only became camp in the attempt to share them without embarrassment.
Richard Rodriguez
It has been fashionable in the twentieth century not only to debunk myth, ... but to pretend that that reasonable and educated people could avoid the embarrassment of religion and the risk of metaphysics by sticking close to demonstrable facts and testable hypotheses. However, in the course of reducing our beliefs and hopes to certainties and proofs, we impoverished and deluded ourselves. The modern anti-myth reduced human life to a story without a point, a tale told by an idiot, a process without a purpose, a journey without a goal, an affair without a climax (Godot never comes), an accidental collision of mindless atoms. ... We have hardly noticed that economics, technology and politics have become the new myth and metaphysic. We haven't avoided myth and metaphysics, only created demeaning ones.
Sam Keen
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassmentà.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn't belong there. Ande saw the movie 12 Years as a Slave, you know, they were raped. And he says they had dignity as slaves or- My parents lost everything that th middle of their lives, in their thirties. His business, my father's business, our home, our freedom and we're supposed to call that dignified? Marched out of our homes at gun point. I mean, this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America.
Clarence Thomas
I think it was really a difficult situation for him. His career was ending in 10 minutes and I think trying to come to terms with that and at the same time win a World Cup was . . . it would be just so difficult emotionally and he was probably on the edge without being provoked and then to be provoked probably was just too much for him. I can completely understand how difficult that would be. I think he probably faced some shame, embarrassment, disappointment; but I also think he feels like the guy made some awful remarks and his action was warranted. I don't think he wants the kids to see that, but I also don't think he regrets it. It's tough -- he's one of the top three players to play the game. He's already won the European Cup, the World Cup and I think everyone, his teammates included, idolize him in his country, so I think he'll be quickly forgiven.
Zinedine Zidane
There had been little about our childhood that could be described as paradisiacal. Our alcoholic father was either brutal or sullenly withdrawn. Our mother retaliated with religious fanaticism. As she knelt before plaster images of saints, in the flicker of votive candles, her furious mutter was more like invective than prayer. Their manias kept my parents quite busy, and Elena and I were more or less left to raise ourselves.
Elena and I were united only in our unspoken determination to show nothing of what we felt about this embarrassment of a life that our parents had visited upon us. In this we succeeded. To the outside world we were simply quiet children, good at school, not very social, a little high-strung.
Michael Nava
In America you can ease into middle age with the accoutrements of adolescence still prominent and suffer relatively minor embarrassment: okay, so the guy's still got his sideburns and rod and beer and beergut and wife and three kids and a duplex and never grew up. So what? You're not supposed to grow up in America. You're supposed to consume. But in Britain it seems there is some ideal, no, some dry river one is expected to ford, so you can enter that sedate bubble where you raise a family, contributing in your small way to your society and keep your mouth shut. Until you get old, that is, when you can become an "eccentric" - do and say outrageous things, naughty things, because it's expected of you, you've crossed to the other mirror of the telescope of childhood.
Lester Bangs
Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.
Hermann Hesse
Art had a disquieting power of producing social embarrassment; [...] it caused people to make silly remarks and then laugh self-consciously, as if the pictures, which knew better, could hear them. It could not be just ignorance; displays of armor and mummies and natural-history exhibits did not have that effect. [...] If you were with art long enough, [...] you began to get the feeling that it was looking right at you.
Mary McCarthy
When I run into couples who recognize me, it's usually the women who are the most friendly. Once, at a Greek restaurant in New York City, a huge family was seated at a table nearby. Late in the evening, the grandmother stood up and said, ‘Tera, I love you! I watch you all night long!' Her daughter almost had a heart attack out of embarrassment. The grandma replied, ‘Honey, I may be old, but I'm not dead yet!'
Tera Patrick
But when I went back to him with her acceptance, the PM looked sheepish and informed me that he had already agreed to appoint Syeda Hameed, a Muslim writer and social activist, and so, I was told, there was no place left for Anu. Clearly, the ‘gender' and ‘minority' boxes had been filled up with Syeda's appointment. I was left with the embarrassing task of explaining away the confusion to Anu. What I obviously could not say to her was that the political benefits of rewarding a Muslim may well have trumped those of appointing a Parsi! To my dismay, even Dr Singh seemed to take this embarrassment lightly.
Manmohan Singh
I don't want to be too hard on Islam here, for two reasons: firstly because I don't want to be murdered by some hysterical, self-righteous, carpet-chewing, book-burning muppet with shit for brains. And secondly, I do think we need to make allowances for Islam, because we have to remember Islam is quite a young religion. So, maybe right now it's just going through a difficult age, a little headstrong, full of itself, thinks it knows all the answers, but I'm sure it'll learn. I think years from now, a lot of intelligent Muslims will be looking back on all this Medievalism and Jihad nonsense with embarrassment and shame, like the Germans do with the Nazis, and maybe then we can all have a good laugh about it, but in the mean time I think that any religion that demands earthly vengeance and retribution for any reason is not really a religion at all, but an illness and should be treated as such.
Pat Condell
'I train for honor'... I train because somewhere in my DNA there's a memory of a more ferocious world, a world where men could become what they are and reach the most terrifyingly magnificent state of their nature. I don't train to impress the majority of modern slobs. I train to be worthy enough to be worthy enough to 'carry water' for my barbarian fathers, and to be worthy of the company of the men most like them today. I train because I imagine the disgust and contempt out ancestors would have for us all if they lined up modern men on the street. I train to be less of an embarrassment to their memory. I train because most modern men dishonor all of the men who came before them. I train "as if" they were watching and judging us... I train because it is better to imagine oneself as a soldier in a spiritual army training for a war that may never come than it is to shrug, slouch and shuffle forward into a dysgenic and dystopian future.
Jack Donovan
We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he's doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won't, can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, "I won't. You can't make me.”)
Paul Goodman
