Bombast Quotes & Sayings

Captain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck. — Leslie Ford

For years, I advised George Steinbrenner to get out of town because he dishonored my hometown with his bullying and bombast. — George Vecsey

Animal Farm is a warning to every reader. Beware the utopia; beware the perfect solution and the easy slogan; beware those who claim to know what is best for you; beware bombast and dogma; beware the death of doubt; beware those who do not practice what they preach. Beware the chosen. Beware the one and only true path. — George Orwell

It is astonishing how articulate one can become when alone and raving at a radio. Arguments and counter arguments, rhetoric and bombast flow from one's lips like scurf from the hair of a bank manager. — Stephen Fry

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ... ," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions. — Philip Warren Anderson

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that. — Harold Prince

The most important things must be said simply, for they are spoiled by bombast; whereas trivial things must be described grandly, for they are supported only by aptness of expression, tone and manner. — Jean De La Bruyere

I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart. - I shall be employed about things, not words! — Mary Wollstonecraft

Generally certain symptoms appear, among them a peculiar use of language: one wants to speak forcefully in order to impress one's opponent, so one employs a special, "bombastic" style full of neologisms which might be described as "power-words." This symptom is observable not only in the psychiatric clinic but also among certain modern philosophers, and, above all, whenever anything unworthy of belief has to be insisted on in the teeth of inner resistance: the language swells up, overreaches itself, sprouts grotesque words distinguished only by their needless complexity. The word is charged with the task of achieving what cannot be done by honest means. — C. G. Jung

It is the same with revolution; so long as the proper spirit is spreading amongst our young men, we are satisfied that it spreads without bombast or parade. — Henry Lawson

This subject brings me to that vilest offspring of the herd mind
the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake
the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism
how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I had rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings. — Albert Einstein

Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.
Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory. — Catherynne M Valente

I made up three lists: Candidate's Accomplishments (real and imaginary), Accusations Against Opponent (including rumours, allegations, innuendos, and lies), and Empty Promises (the more improbable, the better). Then it was merely a matter of taking various combinations of items from the three lists, throwing in some bombast, tossing in a few local references, and, there it was - a brand new speech. — Rohinton Mistry

Among the books there were also some containing bombast. They didn't try to portray Nature as it is within and outside of man; rather, they tried to make it more beautiful, seeking to elicit certain effects. I turned away from them. If reality isn't sacred to them, how are they capable of creating something more beautiful than God's Creation? — Adalbert Stifter

Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. — Robert Greene

The moment illuminates the political Jefferson - a man who got his way quietly but unmistakably, without bluster or bombast, his words congenial but his will unwavering. — Jon Meacham

Bombast, an old Swabian name, has inevitably given rise to the idea that Paracelsus's bluster and arrogance lie at the root of the word "bombastic." One feels that it ought to be so, but it is not. Baum means "tree" in German (in the Swabian dialect it is rendered Bom), and Baumbast is the fibrous layer of a tree's bark. But in the sixteenth century "bombast" had also come to mean cotton padding, inappropriately derived from bombax, the medieval Latin name for the silkworm, and it is from this origin that the connotation of puffed up derives. — Philip Ball

Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the "Critical-Subjective," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premises apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphtha's "morally chaotic All. — Thomas Mann

Death and death alone is what we must consult about life; and not some vague future or survival, in which we shall not be present. It is our own end; and everything happens in the interval between death and now. Do not talk to me of those imaginary prolongations which wield over us the childish spell of number; do not talk to me - to me who am to die outright - of societies and peoples! There is no reality, there is no true duration, save that between the cradle and the grave. The rest is mere bombast, show, delusion! They call me a master because of some magic in my speech and thoughts; but I am a frightened child in the presence of death! — Maurice Maeterlinck

Intelligence is a way of thinking, not a choice of words. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

How now, my sweet creature of bombast! How long is't ago, Jack, since thou saw'st thien own knee? — William Shakespeare

Here was a separate world, with different wrestlers and a wholly different concept of the wrestling enterprise. Where the NWA as a whole - and GCW in particular - had become increasingly gritty and realistic, the WWF was gaudy and cartoonish, a parade of outsize gimmickry. Where GCW was filled with angst, the WWF was all bombast. If GCW was a well-choreographed brawl in a bar parking lot, the WWF had the glittery sheen of a major boxing spectacle. They were in many ways similar, but to the Southern fan attuned to the traditional NWA sensibility, the WWF couldn't have been more alien. — David Shoemaker

Small-minded speakers and writers hide behind big words. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. — Frederick Douglass

Jimi on the box, thirty stories up, everything immediate, yet distanced. Jimi's chords locked in aerial dogfights, gliding, riding, sliding, hiding, belligerent bursts, hallucinogenic, a head-warping face-wiping mind melt, chords live dive bombers screaming in for the kill, scintillating, serrated chords shot through with arc-light shrieks of staccato mayhem, as immediate and horrific as the firefight racketing away this very second below our red and puffy eyes; chords that hang in the air like the retinal reflection of an eerie afterburn, the stars displaced and the smell of a world that burned. Overhead, night birds flying, Huey, Apache, Chinook, whooshing with murderous potential. And over everything - every apocalyptic bang, boom, and rattle - Jimi, bleating like Braxton and bonding with the bombast. — Roger Steffens

This place is packed with beautiful hipsters. While the Coney Island bombast radiated sincerity, everything here seems more ironic. When someone in the crowd ironically chants, 'USA!' someone else ironically chants back, 'Mother Russia. — Jon Ronson

After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy. — Mason Cooley

If you would essay to write for the newspaper you must be natural and express yourself in your accustomed way without putting on airs or frills; you must not ape ornaments and indulge in bombast or rhodomontade which stamp a writer as not only superficial but silly. There is no room for such in the everyday newspaper. It wants facts stated in plain, unvarnished, unadorned language. True, you should read the best authors and, as far as possible, imitate their style, but don't try to literally copy them. Be yourself on every occasion - no one else. — Joseph Devlin

Your average man is not intelligent enough not to fake being intelligent enough. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Real confidence has no bluster or bombast. It's not rooted in a desire to seem better than everyone else and it's not driven by a fear of appearing weak. Real confidence settles in when you have a clear vision of exactly what you need to do. Real confidence blooms as you wield the skills and power you have built through your hard work and discipline. — Rob Brezsny

He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul ... He was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there ... He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating in to clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great, when some occasion is presented to him. — John Dryden

This is what it is to grow up. It is to live beyond the blind rush of passion, or hate, or green luxin, or battle juice. It is to see what must be done, and to do it, without feeling a great desire or a great hatred or a great love. It is to confront fear, naked. No armor of bombast or machismo. Just duty, and love for one's fellows. Not love felt, not the love that compelled action without thought, but love chosen deliberately. I am the best person to do this thing, it said, though I may die doing it. — Brent Weeks

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe. — Horace Walpole

I think particularly on the left, progressives wanted more bombast and more. — Dahlia Lithwick

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. — Thomas Ligotti

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. — Robert Hughes