Quotes About Controversy

We remember the famous curve in the shape of a hockey stick… However, no serious scientist still gives it the least credit.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Living your faith is a scary business. It puts you at risk of being reviled by people on all sides, believers and nonbelievers—anyone who sees your taking a stand as a threat to their status quo.

Try arguing the virtues of Nello on chowhound.com, or a similar online meeting ground for knowledgeable food nerds, and prepare to get pilloried.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

I should put reindeer on our Christmas menu,' I mused out loud. 'Can you picture it? All those crying kids, wondering if that's a chunk of Rudolph or Blitzen lying on their plate?' 'I take it you don't have children,' observed Zamir.

As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated, all truth goes through three steps. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.

Unfriendly' witnesses and those who opposed the hearings, such as John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, were vilified.

As the high mountains are intersected by deep valleys, as puritanism in one age begets infidelity in the next, as in many countries the thickness of the winter's ice will be in proportion to the number of the summer musquitoes, so was the keenness of the hostility displayed on this occasion in proportion to the warmth of the support which was manifested.  As the great man was praised, so also was he abused. 

The most deadly enemies of the Roman Catholics are they who love best their religion as Protestants. When we look to individuals we always find it so, though it hardly suits us to admit as much when we discuss these subjects broadly.

The party to which he belonged had, as he knew, endeavoured to avoid the subject of the disendowment of the Church of England. It is the necessary nature of a political party in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change.

That is an opinion on which very much may be said on either side. It is strange how widely the world is divided on a subject which so nearly concerns us all, and which is so close beneath our eyes. Some think that we are quickly progressing towards perfection, while others imagine that virtue is disappearing from the earth.

iniquities of the Puseyites.

Prince James was duly christened according to the full Catholic rite, except that the queen refused to let the priest spit in his mouth as the custom then was, saying according to a later story, that she was not going to have 'a pocky priest' spitting in her child's mouth.

All writing is pigshit.

it was even said that Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, had bitten the jugular of a priest;

I hate all the arts! you say. My dear sir, I respect you more and more.

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets.

Adamski's Disease.

A fin-de-siècle philosopher had once remarked—and been roundly denounced for his pains—that Walter Elias Disney had contributed more to genuine human happiness than all the religious teachers in history. Now, half a century after the artist's death, his dreams were still proliferating across the Florida landscape.

no era aquel un momento para dimes y diretes.

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

America is a mistake, a giant mistake.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.