Antagonistic Quotes & Sayings

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her - one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. — Herman Melville

As he was
forced to tell his father more than once, "I said I'd fight for my mother's
throne. I never said I'd die for it." Then he'd add, simply to annoy the old
bastard into one of his frothy temper tantrums, "Don't you think I'm too
pretty to die? — G.A. Aiken

When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose. — Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

But what is there in man older and deeper than the religious sentiment?
There is man himself; that is, volition and conscience, free-will and law, eternally antagonistic. Man is at war with himself: why?
"Man," say the theologians, "transgressed in the beginning; our race is guilty of an ancient offence. For this transgression humanity has fallen; error and ignorance have become its sustenance. Read history, you will find universal proof of this necessity for evil in the permanent misery of nations. Man suffers and always will suffer; his disease is hereditary and constitutional. Use palliatives, employ emollients; there is no remedy. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I won't wax poetic about the land in a perfectionist sense: we work hard out here, and things constantly threaten the tiny equilibrium we've established in the market garden. Whatever peace we find is often hard won. But I stand firmly with Berry and Kingsolver and so many other writers who possess a deep need to step outside the city to find a place of calm. I don't like the word "authentic"; at best, it's divisive and antagonistic, implying one way of being is intrinsically better than another. But I do very much favour the notion of alignment. I'm convinced that at the heart of the matter lies a desire to draw what we do into alignment with how we live. Some of us aren't in a place where we can live consistently on the land that holds our hearts, but come mishaps or miracles, we're bound and determined to make that land as much a part of who we are as humanly possible. — Jenna Butler

Scribbler, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own. — Ambrose Bierce

Every young man's heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose only actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts. — Andre Malraux

I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom. — Whitfield Diffie

The more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances - the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

What may be the significance of so many forms of "spirituality" on this planet that are antagonistic to "life" - and Christianity at the head of that list, with its "calumny" against life, its faith that just because nothing in life is eternal therefore life itself contains no value, nothing that makes it worth living, investing our souls in, committing our consciences to? — Kenny Smith

Pain always makes me antagonistic
are you any different? — V.C. Andrews

At heart men are antagonistic to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not antagonism to creeds or points of view, but antagonism encountered for My sake. Many of us awaken antagonism by our way of stating things; we have to distinguish between being persecuted for some notion of our own and being persecuted for My sake. — Oswald Chambers

You know that we've got a few problems we need to talk through before we get married."
"I'm not getting rid of Pooh."
"See, there you go being antagonistic. Marriage means learning to compromise."
"I didn't say I wouldn't compromise. I promise to take the ribbon out of her topknot before you walk her. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic. — Kate Chopin

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. — Arthur Conan Doyle

and beware of trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world. — F Scott Fitzgerald

By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life ... — John Muir

The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. — H.L. Mencken

It's important to note that when you speak on your own behalf, you are not speaking against others but for yourself. Sometimes we think that people who do not agree with us are against us. This is not true. They merely have a different opinion. If I disagree with your convictions about global warming, the economy, or gay marriage, my purpose is not to be antagonistic or difficult. I am simply being true to my own values and convictions. — Geri Scazzero

Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically sound System - they are indicators that there is something "rotten" (antagonistic, inconsistent) in the very heart of the System. — Slavoj Zizek

A stydy today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties and forties would yield the following theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us. — E.L. Doctorow

The press don't wake up in the morning simply to be a mouthpiece for pols - they're out to uncover and expose news. That often is at odds with what politicians are setting out to do - it's both symbiotic and antagonistic. They need each other, they work in concert with one another, they work against one another. — Beau Willimon

While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible. — Henry Hazlitt

When a bookworm finally decides to leave the house, perhaps to explore some literary destination in one of her novels, she will be surprised to know that there is a volatile, often antagonistic force in the real world known as the weather. — Joyce Rachelle

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors. — Wallace Stevens

Deny a man pleasure, the possession of woman's body and he will show you his true colors.
He will dismiss his frustration onto her, forcibly abuse her, offend her all at the cost of his desires, the fulfillment of his this basic appetite. And if you are not yet convinced then award him the opportunity of having her unconscious and observe what he does henceforth.
He would consider the situation to be in his favor and make most of it.
No, he wouldn't be tender then, you are mistaken, he would be insidious much like a wild animal set loose, unleashed and untameable that is what he would really be.
Or lure a woman with the riches of the world and she will prove to you, her infidelity. And that is how people are, antagonistic when forced to come in terms with denial, authoritative if the situation demands them to be and hypocrites, their naked faces unanimously declaring a common color, black. — Chirag Tulsiani

Women of my age in America are at the mercy of two powerful and antagonistic traditions. The first is the ultradomestic fifties with its powerful cult of motherhood; the other is the strident feminism of the seventies with its attempt to clone the male competitive model ... Only in America are these ideologies pushed to extremes. — Sylvia Ann Hewlett

It is in the nature of man that he is antagonistic toward the others of his sex. Each man sees in another a potential competitor for the limited rewards of male success, and the hostility which arises between them is a part of the natural balance of human life.
It is possible, as in the case of father and son, that a closeness will arise between two men which threatens the functional hostility of each. It is the duty of society to provide an artificial means of encouraging the proper degree of antagonism. — C.S. Friedman

Good and evil, as we term them, are not antagonistic; they are ever found hand in hand. Humanity has never achieved a single conquest without the aid of both. Indeed how can she? What adds to moral strength, but a grappling with temptation? — Sarah Moore Grimke

Finally, I think we believe that when we see an opportunity , we have the duty to work for the growth of that international community of knowledge and understanding with our colleagues in other lands , with our colleagues in competing, antagonistic, possibly hostile lands, with our colleagues and with others with whom we have any community f interest, any community of professional, of human, of political concern. [...] We think of this as our contribution to the making of a world which is varied and cherishes variety, which is free and cherishes freedom, and which is freely changing to adapt to the inevitable needs of change in the twentieth century and all centuries to come, but a world which, with all its variety, freedom, and change, is without nation states armed for war and above all, a world without war. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

And she felt the words come from some iron place within her that hadn't existed an hour ago. She didn't speak loudly, but there was such a change in her voice. Coming from that iron place, it was heavy and true; it wasn't persuasive, or desperate, or antagonistic. It just was. — Laini Taylor

I believe that also it should be stressed and made clear that our antagonistic position is not to say "I don't like whites" for the simple fact of not liking white people. It's like, our fight is not against the white person per se, but against the exercises of white supremacy and the form in which whiteness and the politics of whiteness operates. — Bocafloja

More than the divides of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture. — Chris Hedges

Gnani' [the englightened one] gives freedom from all sufferings. Outside [world] reigns the cycle of antagonistic [painful] times, Kaliyug. On the contrary, it will even take away whatever happiness you may have. — Dada Bhagwan

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic. — Garet Garrett

Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim. — Anne Lamott

Words like 'always' and 'never' were meaningful to my father, who thought in absolutes and whose mind consequently made great leaps in antagonistic directions when it leapt at all. — Tsitsi Dangarembga

The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's duties. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's dreadful when two people's senses of humor are antagonistic. I don't believe there's any bridging that gulf! — Jean Webster

You are allowed to be friends with non- or ex-Scientologists, as long as they aren't antagonistic toward Scientology. If they are, you are expected to disconnect or break off all ties with that member, who is considered a Suppressive Person. A person is declared by the church to be an SP for a variety of reasons, which may include going to the authorities about the church or making any kind of negative comment about it publicly or in the press. Both are considered suppressive acts that can have devastating consequences for relationships. And furthermore, if the church were to find out that you remained in contact with an SP, you would then be declared an SP as well. — Leah Remini

I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who's never even attempted to play it. — Bobby Knight

Capitalism has been called nationalistic - yet it is the only system that banished ethnicity, and made it possible, in the United States, for men of various, formerly antagonistic nationalities to live together in peace. — Ayn Rand

They were blind to a cold fact of evolution ... that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks. — Alfred Bester

Happy people generally are more forgiving, helpful, and charitable, have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, defensive, antagonistic, and self-absorbed. Oscar Wilde observed, One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy. — Gretchen Rubin

So, your Socially Intelligent and altruistic behaviour doesn't just
benefit your friends and colleagues; you benefit too. If you leave people
on a high note, you leave yourself on that same high note! You thus
feed your own memory banks with wonderful and uplifting memories,
as well as boosting your own resistance to stress, illness and disease.
BUT REMEMBER: The opposite is also true ...
If you leave your friends, lovers and colleagues on antagonistic and
unpleasant notes, you help them to flood their own bodies with
poisons that leave them physically unbalanced, their immune systems
weakened, and their memories fouled.
And you do the same to yourself!
The choice is yours ... — Tony Buzan

Many men I come across see women in an antagonistic way, and it's always the basis for a bad relationship. What I mean by that is men who come with pre-conceived notions that women are trying to tie them down, or hold them back, or that women are shallow, or that women are only attracted to money, or whatever it is. — Matthew Hussey

Such immaturity will manifest itself in a lack of integrity. This lack will critically affect the child's spiritual development; the less able a child is to deal with anger well, the more antagonistic will be his attitude toward authority, including the authority of God. A child's immature handling of anger is a primary reason the child will reject the parent's spiritual values. — Gary Chapman

Vinyaya was being openly antagonistic, and that was an emotion that could be trusted, unless of course it was a bluff and the commander was a secret fan of his, unless it was a double bluff and she really did feel antagonistic. — Eoin Colfer

I want to communicate with people, and I want to make something that works, and that people like. I'm never purposefully trying to be antagonistic or shocking or anything that would push an audience away. I'm always hoping to reach as many people as I can. — Joe Swanberg

There's always an antagonistic personality in any group, simply because life isn't meant to be simple. Our thoughts can be clear, we may know what we want, but life will always show us the duality, simply because that's how things are meant to be. Before a three, there's a two. Before the change, there is the choice. it's just what it is. And yet, the antagonist is often the one we love the most, because that's how his temptation can lead us astray. — Robin Sacredfire

Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic. — Noam Chomsky

Eldric turned away from the mirror, holding out his hand. In the cup of his hand lay his fidget of paper clips. But the fidget had blossomed into a crown. An allover-filigree crown, with a twisty spire marking the front.
I stared at it for some moments. "It's for you," said Eldric. "If you want it."
"I'm seventeen," I said. "I haven't played at princess for years."
"Does that matter ?" Eldric set it on my head. It was almost weightless, a true crown for the steam age.
In a proper story, antagonistic sparks would fly between Eldric and me, sparks that would sweeten the inevitable kiss on page 324. But life doesn't work that way. I didn't hate Eldric, which, for me, is about as good as things get. — Franny Billingsley

We are here a nation, composed of the most heterogeneous elements-Protestants and Catholics, English, French, German, Irish, Scotch, every one, let it be remembered, with his traditions, with his prejudices. In each of these conflicting antagonistic elements, however, there is a common spot of patriotism, and the only true policy is that which reaches that common patriotism and makes it vibrate in all toward common ends and common aspirations. — Wilfrid Laurier

When the imagination and will power are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception. — Emile Coue

You want everyone to be a full character. No one is just evil, or very few people are, hopefully. They're characters, so you want to flush them out. You've got to show all sides of them. There is definitely an antagonistic relationship between guards and prisoners, and I do think it flares up. — Jenji Kohan

Anti-Semitism is nothing but the antagonistic attitude produced in the non-Jew by the Jewish group. This is a normal social reaction. The Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world ... the root cause is their use of enemies they create in order to keep solidarity ... — Albert Einstein

It became very clear to the director that it would be foolish not to use our friendship. I had tried to talk to him about it because all the relationships in the film are so, not negative, but antagonistic. There's not a lot of love going around. — Jennifer Beals

It is not unusual now to hear religion and humanism spoken of as if they were opposed, even antagonistic. But humanism clearly rested on the idea that people have souls, and that they have certain obligations to them, and certain pleasures in them, which arise from their refinement or their expression in art or in admirable or striking conduct, or which arise from finding other souls expressed in music or philosophy or philanthropy or revolution. — Marilynne Robinson

Who knows the origin of religion? Certainly not the one who believes in it. Understanding and belief are quite antagonistic. The man who understands religion does not believe in it, the man who believes in it does not understand it. — Chapman Cohen

Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality, and human nature. — Robert Bork

Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society. — Vladimir Lenin

The heartfelt sympathy and friendship offered to America after the 9/11 attacks, even from formerly antagonistic regimes, has been largely dissipated; increasingly unilateral and domineering policies have brought international trust in our country to its lowest level in memory ... — Jimmy Carter

Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself to the situation; she could not be - no woman with a heart bigger than a hazel-nut could be - antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry. — Thomas Hardy

In the present epoch of struggle between two worlds the two opposing and antagonistic trends penetrating the foundations of nearly all branches of biology are particularly sharply defined. — Trofim Lysenko

I'm somewhat antagonistic towards these various projects that charge $250,000 per person for the ability to be weightless for 3 minutes after being brought up from earth. I think there are such better uses for that money that i seriously question the ethics of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on space flights for extremely wealthy people. — Arthur Frommer

In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult ... There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The later are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them. — Jean Piaget

In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth. The only way organized authority meets this grave situation is by extending still greater privileges to those who have already monopolized the earth, and by still further enslaving the disinherited masses. Thus the entire arsenal of government - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons, - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society. — Emma Goldman

The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government - one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us. — Hugo Black

On the surface the avant garde as a whole seems united primarily in terms of what they are against: the rejection of social institutions and established artistic conventions, or antagonism towards the public (as representative of the existing order). By contrast any positive programme tends to be claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic sub-groups. So modern art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as much by manifestos as imaginative work. — C. D. Innes

In the long sentences of the president's message, semicolons followed by "yet" or "but" separated clauses that balanced each side of an issue, reflecting Roosevelt's characteristic "on the one hand, on the other" style of crediting antagonistic views. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser. — Theodore Kaczynski

I intensely dislike the word 'critic,' because it puts you in an antagonistic position to artists. I've learned everything that I know about art from artists ... I see myself as an advocate and an activist and a writer. — Lucy R. Lippard

But isn't a life based on seeking personal happiness by nature self-centered, even self-indulgent? Not necessarily. In fact, survey after survey has shown that it is unhappy people who tend to be most self-focused and are often socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic. Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative and are able to tolerate life's daily frustrations more easily than unhappy people. And, most important, they are found to be more loving and forgiving than unhappy people. — Dalai Lama XIV

I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people. — Ernesto Che Guevara

If amino acids can only be made where there is no free oxygen in the atmosphere, and porphyrins can only be made when there is free oxygen, then these things needed by every cell could not have existed together to form the first cell! What's more, many of these compounds are antagonistic. They will combine and destroy each other - anywhere except within a living cell. — Lawrence O. Richards

The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles. — Georg Simmel

You have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you're at war and might get your head blown off any second."
"I more than resent it, sir. I'm absolutely incensed."
"You have deep-seated survival anxieties. And you don't like bigots, bullies, snobs, or hypocrites. Subconsciously there are many people you hate."
"Consciously, sir, consciously," Yossarian corrected in an effort to help. "I hate them consciously."
"You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated, or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!"
"Yes, sir. Perhaps I am."
"Don't try to deny it."
"I'm not denying it, sir," said Yossarian, pleased with the miraculous rapport that finally existed between them. "I agree with all you've said. — Joseph Heller

Only those who see that the two sides of all phenomena, visible and invisible, are front and back or beginning and end of one reality can embrace any antagonistic situation, see its complementarity , and help others to do the same, thereby establishing peace and harmony. — George Ohsawa

There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. — Norman Douglas

A human mind was built for contact with similar minds. It should, - in fact, - it must think about what is going on around it; for, if it is shut up in a thick, dark, bony box of a skull, it will always stay in that condition known as "status quo"; and grow up, antagonistic to all surroundings. — Ernest Vincent Wright

Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology. — Trofim Lysenko

I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize. — James Joseph Sylvester

I think one should be antagonistic to one's underlings. It keeps them on their toes.
~Soi Fon — Tite Kubo

As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction. — Sigmund Freud

China surely must be interested in a more stable, non-antagonistic relationship with the African continent precisely because of its own needs and therefore has to say: in our own interest, as China, it is necessary that we participate in the process of development of the African continent. — Thabo Mbeki

I'm having fun opening up. Sort of struggling to get the audience into it. It's good. It makes you fight. Not fight like antagonistic. But fight for what you believe. — Joan Jett

As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

He and I always think the same things are funny, and that is such a lot; it's dreadful when two people's senses of humour are antagonistic. I don't
believe there's any bridging that gulf!
And he is
Oh, well! He is just himself, and I miss him, and miss him, and miss him. The whole world seems empty and aching. I hate the moonlight because it's beautiful and he isn't here to see
it with me. But maybe you've loved somebody, too, and you know? If you have, I don't need to explain; if you haven't, I can't explain. — Jean Webster

Egotorial: An editorial in broadcasting or print media where the subject matter is secondary to the superficial, pretentious, antagonistic, or materialistic ego of the author. — Grant McLachlan

The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last and then will be fought the mighty battle on which the world will look with breathless interest; for on its issue the freedom or the slavery of the world will depend. — Christopher Hitchens

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us. — Anne Lamott

Further study of central nervous action, however, finds central inhibition too extensive and ubiquitous to make it likely that it is confined solely to the taxis of antagonistic muscles. — Charles Scott Sherrington

They are both stances of "disbelief," but mere cynicism is negative, a withdrawal from politics into private tranquility, while "kynicism" is openly antagonistic, a radically engaged reaction to the collapse of meaningful options within the public sphere. — Drew Daniel

You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself. — Steven Pinker

My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. — Mahatma Gandhi

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began. — Chris Cleave

Boxing encompasses the very worst and very best of human nature and its beautiful brutality is a marvelous contradiction for a writer. It conjures up so many irreconcilably antagonistic feelings. — Brian D'Ambrosio

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. — Herbert Marcuse

The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. (p. 21) — Rollo May

The traditional, correct pre-Marxist view on exploitation was that of radical laissez-faire liberalism as espoused by, for instance, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. According to them, antagonistic interests do not exist between capitalists, as owners of factors of production, and laborers, but between, on the one hand, the producers in society, i.e., homesteaders, producers and contractors, including businessmen as well as workers, and on the other hand, those who acquire wealth non-productively and/or non-contractually, i.e., the state and state-privileged groups, such as feudal landlords. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe