Cudgel Quotes & Sayings

Grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgment that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. Nobody ever gave you a grade for learning how to play, how to ride a bicycle, or how to kiss. One of the best ways to destroy love for any of these activities would be through the use of grades, and the coercion and judgment they represent. Grades are a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do, an important instrument in inculcating children into a lifelong subservience to whatever authority happens to be thrust over them. — Derrick Jensen

There are ceremonious bows that repel one like a cudgel. — Christian Nestell Bovee

The mob is a sort of bear; while your ring is through its nose, it will even dance under your cudgel; but should the ring slip, and you lose your hold, the brute will turn and rend you. — Jane Porter

Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems. — Colette

The golden fleece of self-sufficiency guards against cudgel- blows but not against pin-pricks. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There's a saying that goes something like: 'We are all one drink or pill away from addiction,' and I know this is meant to destigmatize what addicts go through, but I feel like I've been seeing variations on this 'common knowledge' more and more lately being used (on social media) as a cudgel to remind patients to not overdo it," Anna says, speaking to the dual-edged sword of awareness. A motto designed to humanize the experience of addiction has been turned into a weapon that targets people who rely on opioids for pain management, and that translates to real-world stigma. — S. E. Smith

Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting. It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions. Kiechel says that when the criminal was driven in the cart under the gallows, and left hanging by the neck as the cart moved from under him, his friends and acquaintances pulled at his legs in order that he might be strangled the sooner. — William Shakespeare

And after I told my six-year-old, grandma died in the accident, after tears and questions she suggested, maybe now is a good time to explain what the man has to do with babies. So i chose one perfect lily from that vase and with the tip of a paring knife slit open the pistil to trace the passage pollen makes to the egg cell- the eggs i then slipped out and dotted on her fingertips, their greenish-white translucent as the air in this blizzard that cannot cool the unbearable heart. — Kimiko Hahn

Freedom from menial work should be a rallying cry, not a cudgel to be used against the Left. How much liberty is there in having to do something you hate in order to survive? — Alex Pareene

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent
all depending on who wields it and how. — Steven D. Levitt

Instantly they fettered him, and carried him away to the regiment. There he was made to wheel about to the right, and to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his rammer, to present, to fire, to march, and they gave him thirty blows with a cudgel. The next day he did his exercise a little less badly, and he received but twenty blows. The day following they gave him only ten, and he was regarded by his comrades as a prodigy. Candide, — Voltaire

I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats - any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death - then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don't you see, this is just the point - what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful. — Boris Pasternak

Mr. Rivenhall said to Sophy, "If this is your doing - !"
"I promise you it is not. If I thought that he had the smallest notion of your hostility, I should say that he had rolled you up, Charles, foot and guns!"
He was obliged to laugh. "I doubt if he would have the smallest notion of anything less violent than a blow from a cudgel. How you can tolerate the fellow!"
"I told you that I was not at all nice in my ideas. Come, don't let us talk of him! I have sworn an oath to heaven not to quarrel with you today."
"You amaze me! Why?"
"Don't be such an ape!" she begged. "I want to drive your grays, of course! — Georgette Heyer

We are particularly frustrated that so much of our politics today consists of lines first written during the clashes, domestic and foreign, of the 1960s. This "Groundhog Day" approach to replaying the culture war's tropes is perhaps nowhere in greater evidence than in how Americans talk about patriotism. Patriotism, as an idea, has been co-opted over the course of a generation by right-wingers who use the flag not as a symbol of transcendent national unity, but as a sectarian cudgel against the hippies, Francophiles, free-lovers and tree-huggers who constitute their caricature of the American left. The American left, for its part, has been so beaten down by this star-spangled caricature that it has largely ceded the very notion of patriotism to the right. As a result, the first reaction of far too many progressives to any talk of patriotism is automatic, allergic recoil. Needless to say, this reaction simply tightens the screws of the right's imprisoning caricature. — Eric Liu

Everybody stood dead still. It was as if now that we were about to get out of the Tower for the first time since the flood, we were scared, like we were crossing some line that we wouldn't be able to uncross.
Greenleigh — B.E. Scully

We live in a society where we don't want to commit to another person for life. We do at the moment that we marry, but less and less people marry. We marry later, we marry less. On some level of the unconscious, we know there is less of a chance that a marriage will be life-long. — Marilyn Yalom

One bites into the brass mouthpiece of his wooden cudgel, and the other blows his cheeks out on a French horn. Do you call that Art? — Franz Schubert

Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders. — Honore De Balzac

Some people will always think they know how to make other people's marriages better, and, after a while, they'll get to cudgeling you or selling you something; the really entrepreneurial types will sell you the cudgel. — Jill Lepore

cudgel! That's worth thy trouble, — Jacob Grimm

But maybe everybody was like that, all of us living the lives we had to while dreaming of the lives we wanted. — Karen White

I have been sitting around waiting for an opportunity to get to do something that matters for so long. Not just that matters in the world, which I think that season, in particular, had a very important meaning for a lot of people, but for me, as an actress. — Sarah Paulson

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel. — Robert Burns

Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages. — Seth Shostak

Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine - but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring. And protect us from those who can't. — Carol Tavris

What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth. — Boris Pasternak

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, literally, responsibility. When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them, we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices. — Julia Cameron

Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.
It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: "It's not that I don't think sting-tipped blowpipes aren't cool, it's just ... " "I've gotten rally good with the steam-cudgel," a disaffected Pistonpunk might ask her elders "but wouldn't it be useful to ... ?" Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined. — China Mieville

Seizing a cudgel from the nearest priest, he laid about him like a veritable demon as he forged his rapid way toward the altar. The hand of La had paused at the first noise of interruption. When she saw who the author of it was she went white. She had never been able to fathom the secret of the strange white man's escape from the dungeon in which she had locked him. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

For many people the way to success is long and hard, because they do not understand Biblical
principles and the laws of the spirit. — Sunday Adelaja

He smiled affably at the burglar, a burly fellow whom he continued to hold with one hand, as easily as if he had been a child. The entire household had been aroused, and a good number of them had joined in, shouting questions and brandishing various deadly instruments. The burglar glared wildly at Emerson, bare to the waist and bulging with muscle - at Gargery and his cudgel - at Selim, fingering a knife even longer than Nefret's - at assorted footmen armed with pokers, spits, and cleavers - and at the giant form of Daoud advancing purposefully toward him. 'It's a bleedin' army!' he gurgled. 'The lyin' barstard said you was some kind of professor! — Elizabeth Peters

A man's life breath cannot come back again
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth. — Homer

The only word for love is everybody's name. — Dar Williams

He kicked in the door with one casual blow, leaned in, and said, "Please don't run. I'm not in a good mood. Better if you just sit still."
He cocked his head and listened, then smiled. "Ah," he said. "And there he goes. You two wait here. — Rachel Caine

If you declare that you are naturally designed for such a diet, then first kill for yourself what you want to eat. Do it, however, only through your own resources, unaided by cleaver or cudgel or any kind of ax — Plutarch