Quotes About Controversy

any book incapable of offending someone isn't worth the time it takes to read it.

We both know a strange truth about the world: that people judge you by your most controversial half. If you meet a person, Raymond, who is prejudiced, this person will not think to himself, 'This Raymond has a white half, and I will respect that half of him.' People judge you only by the half they don't like. If my family had stayed in Germany, they would not have put half of me in a camp or sent half of me to the gas chamber. No. I would have been completely killed.

How else are you supposed to deal with people who like terrible things? Hit them with a shovel till they stop, that's how.

and tourists who know in their hearts that it's not wrong to get so phenomenally plastered that you punch a police horse because everyone knows horses vote Tory,

prayer from schools? Stripping crucifixes from walls? That would be like taking down the Ten Commandments in the United States. I've never been a churchgoer, but I can't imagine such a thing happening. The churches, even the people who aren't churchgoers, would never stand for having their rights stripped away like that.

Vos quod milia multa basiorum Legistis, male me marem putatis? Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo.

Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And

Finally, we were notorious enough to give our enemies pause.

Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.

Everybody who meddles with Shakespeare biography readily accepts that the Bard was unfaithful to his wife and excuses him for it, but infidelity on the part of his wife is sufficient to justify estrangement.

What the defenders of Christmas were doing was not keeping harmless old customs but rather perpetuating paganism and idolatry.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

Enterramos o machado de guerra a propósito da ditadura do proletariado e da Revolução, mas novos antagonismos surgiram: pena de morte, imigração, prisôes, aborto, droga, eutanásia, energia nuclear, meios de procriação, proteção social, seleção, questões sobre as quais é inútil esperar poder encontrar qualquer unanimidade; nossas sociedades estão entregues ao dilaceramento das perspectivas.

What doesn't polite society, in all seriousness, want to discuss? Sex, money, political corruption, bodily functions, religion, loss and despair? These have been the very subjects attracting writers of comedy since Aristophanes penned "Lysistrata" as a vehicle for the young Joan Rivers.

Of women he was as fond as dogs of the stick; but in the contrary he delighted more than any filthy fellow alive.

I love Germany so much that I preferred when there were two.

I know this might be breaking news to Nicholas Kristof, but guns being 'more lethal than anything else you have around' is sort of the whole point. The issue should not really be the lethality of the gun, but the but the psychology of the person holding it.

It's frequently said that there is 'no reason' for such 'military-style weapons' as the Bushmaster to be available to citizens. But isn't that a lot like saying there is no reason why any civilian should drive a military-style car like the Hummer?

The controllists sometimes get angry when critics suggest that "state led" is a bit of a fabrication.

Wars have always started over religion.

It's okay for Christians throughout centuries to exterminate races and for their priests to rape little kids throughout decades, but trying to give the people the power to think and be individual, that's evil?

Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.

now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald, who's the journalist who seems to want to help him get to Ecuador.

I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn't criticize.