Quotes About Controversy

Tree of Smoke and excoriated Johnson

Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendhal Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

apparently London gave out my address! that's what they're saying...not just London, though! Brazzaville, too!...and said that I'm a dirty pornographer...a letch besides being the most despicable traitor of the century!...I'd make a urinal blush! that what we need is to cleanse France and the French language of this smut-writing, demoralizing, grammaclast who's sullying our sacred homeland and its literary heritage!

Priests know how to bury the worst scandals.

The author relates George Bernard Shaw's sentiments that polite conversation excludes the only two subjects that matter, religion and politics.

In the 1880s the focus of the feud had been adultery; in the 1890s the focus shifted to the divided treasure the poet had left behind. Who had the right to possess her? Who had the right to say what she was?

Let's face it. Our ass is in a crack. We're gonna have to let this nigger bill pass. [Said to Senator John Stennis (D-MS) during debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957]

I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again. [Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ's Special Counsel Harry McPherson.]

She was not just inviting scandal, she was inviting it in partnership with ridicule.

Ah! meu caro Rubião, isto de política pode ser comparado à paixão de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo; não falta nada, nem o discípulo que nega, nem o discípulo que vende. Coroa de espinhos, bofetadas, madeiros, e afinal morre-se na cruz das ideias, pregado pelos cravos da inveja, da calúnia e da ingratidão.

Trump is the first anti-democratic president in modern U.S. history.

In the literary world today, Christianity has pretty well replaced sex as the present pet taboo, not only because Christianity is so often distorted by Christians as well as non-Christians, but because it is too wild and free for the timid.

What else is the electric chair or lethal injection than human sacrifice?

Yesterday's heresy becomes tomorrow's dogma," the bishop replied mildly, and Polly thought once again of Giordano Bruno.

It seems you haven't really become a success until you have as many people as possible condemning you.

We now live in a world where murderers and terrorists can cause death and mayhem, and when the time is "right" for them, they convert to normal human values, and become a global icon and saint!

When your ideas shatter established thought, expect blowback.

Barack Obama has exhibited sympathy, if not for the terrorists, then certainly for the Islamic supremacists.

While he was alive Peter Jennings did considerable damage to the cause of civilization and human deceny [sic] by his sympathy for Jew-hating terrorists and their supporters.

To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

Creationists are possibly gaining more political power. In the U.S., you are constantly hearing stories of school boards harassing teachers and trying to get textbooks banned.

Students are not to read the Bible, jurors are not to hear it, prosecutors cannot quote from it, and teachers are not to display it.

Goethe—it's amusing how we agree about Goethe. The man who sought out serenity and sanity. I hardly know him, and I hate him.

Ces sculptures-là, l'homme qui les a faites, il aimait ce qu'il faisait. Moi, ici, j'ai toujours été contre ce qui est destruction. Les curés, bien sûr, je ne suis pas d'accord ; les églises, j'ai rien contre. Moi, j'ai mon idée, je trouve qu'on devrait en faire des théâtres : c'est riche, on entend bien....