Quotes & Sayings About Epithet

The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature. — Criss Jami

Capitalism, so called, is when free people accumulate capital of their own free will for use on freely determined projects. The fact of the matter is that most of these projects flop. Donald Trump, for example. Every property he touches seems to go to hell. "Fat Cat" would be the wrong epithet for Trump. If someone other than paroled former Enron accountants were keeping his books, he'd probably be shown to have a net worth less than that of your twenty-pound tabby who just shredded the drapes. What — P. J. O'Rourke

Sweet weeping baby Jesus he has a six-pack to beat all six-packs! — P.C. Cast

We lose in depth of expression when we go to inferior animals for comparisons with human beauty. Homer calls Juno ox-eyed; and the epithet suits well with the eyes of that goddess, because she may be supposed, with all her beauty, to want a certain humanity. Her large eyes look at you with a royal indifference. — Leigh Hunt

The epithet "monolithic" is often used as a term of praise in this country; but a monolith is a mass of stone. Human beings are far more complex. — Ilya Ehrenburg

I think that I can count on the fingers of one hand the times you've actually said the word 'women' and not replaced it with an epithet referring to female genitalia."
"Hey, he's not that bad," Warren said. "Sometimes he calls them cows or whores. — Patricia Briggs

There is a fear of peace that I don't understand. Witness the old epithet "peaceniks," the association of peace with weakness. We mistake kindness for weakness in individuals, too. Gandhi found the essence of Christianity to be gentleness, the exaltation of means over ends. Using violence, against us or them, to achieve peace is like beating children to get them to be good. It only works in the short term. Believe in peace, think peace, live peace. Be a building-block of peace. Make it the center of your strength. — Jennifer James

The use of 'conspiracy theory' as a derogatory - as an epithet almost - is something the propagandists have perfected over the decades, and it's a useful tool for eliminating articulate dissent and other points of view, and information that might be inconvenient for a policy agenda. — Chris Sanders

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. — W. Somerset Maugham

The term "queer" is not simply a 1990s recoding of a pre-Stonewall epithet but here refers to a myriad forms of same-sex and other non-normative kinds of desire that have come to inform certain specific identity groups such as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender individuals, transsexuals, transvestites, cross dressers, drag queens, drag kings, alternative straights and anyone in between. — Chantal Zabus

The infernal flag-waving after 9/11 nearly drove liberals out of their gourds. For the left, 'flag-waving' is an epithet. — Ann Coulter

The epithet Sindhusthan besides being Vedic had also a curious advantage which could only be called lucky and yet is too substantial to be ignored. The word Sindhu in Sanskrit does not only mean the Indus but also the Sea-which girdles the southern peninsula - so that this one word Sindhu points out almost all frontiers of the land at a single stroke. Even if we do not accept the tradition that the river Brahmaputra is only a branch of the Sindhu which falls into flowing streams on the eastern and western slopes of the Himalayas and thus constitutes both our eastern as well as western frontiers. still it is indisputably true that it circumscribes our northern and western extremities in its sweep and so the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of our whole Motherland : the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu - from the Indus to the Seas. — Anonymous

The modern revisionists and reactionaries call us Stalinists, thinking that they insult us and, in fact, that is what they have in mind. But, on the contrary, they glorify us with this epithet; it is an honor for us to be Stalinists for while we maintain such a stand the enemy cannot and will never force us to our knees. — Enver Hoxha

The said Ivan Dovgochkun, son of Nikifor, when I went to him with a friendly proposition, called me publicly by an epithet insulting and injurious to my honor, namely, a goose, whereas it is known to the whole district of Mirgorod, that I never was named after that disgusting animal, and have no intention of ever being named after it. And the proof of my noble extraction is, that, in the baptismal register to be found in the Church of the Three Bishops, the day of my birth, and likewise the fact of my baptism, are inscribed. But a goose, as is well known to every one who has any knowledge of science, cannot be inscribed in the baptismal register; for a goose is not a man, but a fowl: which, likewise, is sufficiently well known, even to persons who have not been to a seminary. But the evil-minded nobleman, being privy to all these facts, for no other purpose than to offer a deadly insult to my rank and calling, affronted me with the aforesaid foul word. — Nikolai Gogol

They say nothing!" the little captain raged. "They only putrid gunner, ship engineer. I, Ba-Karkar, must speak for all!"

Ogu kicked him again. "Then ask what kind help Asahel wants, untranslatable epithet male. Or no more untranslatable for you! Never again in putrid boomer prison."

Her husband gave a choked gasp. "Cruel female!"

"No more sex, either," she added. — Julian May

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature. — Samuel Johnson

Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense. — Robert G. Ingersoll

If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse; there is no argument in an epithet. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Lucifer's bouncing balls, Kitten, not again! — Jeaniene Frost

The truth is, that common-sense, or thought as it first emerges above the level of the narrowly practical, is deeply imbued with that bad logical quality to which the epithet metaphysical is commonly applied; and nothing can clear it up but a severe course of logic. — Charles Sanders Peirce

It must be reiterated that no reasoning founded on the principies of philosophical ethics or of the Christian creed can reject as fundamentally unjust an economic system that succeeds in improving the material conditions of ali people, and assign the epithet "just" to a system that tends to spread poverty and starvation. The evaluation of any economic system must be made by careful analysis of its effects upon the welfare of people, not by an appeal to an arbitrary concept of justice which neglects to take these effects into full account. — Ludwig Von Mises

Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best. — James Russell Lowell

I really think next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing; and the epithet which I should covet the most next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred. — Lord Chesterfield

In a calm, clear voice, she suggested that the wyrsa in question could do several highly improbable, athletically difficult and possibly biologically impractical things involving its own mother, a few household implements, and a dead fish. — Mercedes Lackey

ohmygod. did all hell just freeze over? — P.C. Cast

It's a time-honored truism of diplomacy that the most resented epithet is the one most accurately depicting the deficiencies of the recipient. — Keith Laumer

Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man. — Edward Gibbon

He spits out an epithet so nasty I think it's only legal in England. And then only when your favourite football club loses. — Tera Lynn Childs

The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these Germans; the enjoyment of it, their best treasure; the word that expressed that enjoyment the most pleasing to their ear. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained the honourable epithet of Franks or Freemen; which concealed, though it did not extinguish, the peculiar names of the several states of the confederacy. — Edward Gibbon

It's easy to attack an artist as misogynist, but that's really such a facile epithet. And if an artist is constantly worrying about how others will judge a work, it can end up being a block to investigating certain areas of human nature or certain truths about sexuality. — Lisa Yuskavage

What in the name of Voldy's pasty-white rear end was that? — G. Norman Lippert

It is clear that when an immaterial entity is being referred to rather than a guiser, this figure is a conflation of perhaps a number of Pagan deities with the ecclesiastical principle of evil. The epithet 'old' ('auld' in Scots) prefixes many of the names given to this being: Old Nick, The Old 'un, The Old Lad, Old Scratch, Old Ragusan, Old Sam, Old Horny, Old Bargus, Old Bogy, Old Providence, The Auld Chiel and The Auld Gudeman. Old is clearly a reference to something ancient, most likely belief — Nigel Pennick

I'd rather kiss a wookie! — Donald F. Glut

The term American, like the term democrat, began as an epithet, the former referring to an inferior, provincial creature, the latter to one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses. — Joseph J. Ellis

My dear!" I remonstrated, in allusion to the epithet and the vigorous emphasis Miss Jellyby set upon it. "Your duty as a child - " "Oh! Don't talk of duty as a child, Miss Summerson; where's Ma's duty as a parent? All made over to the public and Africa, I suppose! Then let the public and Africa show duty as a child; it's much more their affair than mine. You — Charles Dickens

In writing, they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being by any special name. He is symbolized by what may be termed the heiroglyphic of a pyramid, /. In prayer they address Him by a name which they deem too sacred to confide to a stranger, and I know it not. In conversation they generally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good. The letter V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly always denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said so much; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print ... substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question. — Charles Lamb

Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be fruitful, and multiply'. But not in those words. — Woody Allen

In its short history as a state, Alaska has earned an unnerving epithet: It is the rape capital of the U.S. At nearly 80 rapes per 100,000, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, Alaska's rape rate is almost three times the national average; for child sexual assault, it's nearly six times. — Anonymous

If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection. — Howard Thurman

The doctrine of the mean (the epithet 'golden' is un-Aristotelian) regularly occurs in later writers as a piece of moral advice -- a recipe or rule reminding us to 'observe the mean', to be moderate in all things and to avoid excess and deciciency. (If the doctrine urges us not to drink too much wine, it equally urges us not to drink too little -- but that is something which the moralizers usually find it prudent to ignore.) — Jonathan Barnes

Alec muttered a retort into his coffee. It rhymed with something that sounded a lot more like ducking glass mole. — Cassandra Clare

When you were talking about the caste system, I was thinking about how Mexicans still have to come to terms with this in our own culture. We spoke earlier about the castas paintings that were made during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mexico. The Spanish, establishing a form of racial apartheid, delineate the fifty-three categories of racial mixtures between Africans, Indians, and the Spanish. And they have names, like tiente en el aire, which means stain in the air; and salta otras, which means jump back; or mulatto, a word that comes from mula, the unnatural mating between the horse and the donkey. "Sambo" is now a racial epithet in the US, but it was first used as one of the fifty-three racial categories in the castas paintings. — Amalia Mesa-Bains

Are you sure he's all right, Susie?" Susan smiled a little defensively. "Sure, I'm sure. He looks like ... oh, I don't know - a college instructor or something." "They say the Mad Bomber looked like a gardener," Mrs Norton said reflectively. "Moose shit," Susan said cheerfully. It was an epithet that never failed to irritate her mother. — Stephen King

Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?"
Gawaine could do no more than nod.
"Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican. — Heywood Broun

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters. — Paul Gauguin

So why in the name of Merlin's saggy left - "
"Don't talk to your mother like that. — J.K. Rowling

As a result of the feminist revolution, 'feminine' becomes an abusive epithet. — Wyndham Lewis

Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment. — Michael Pollan

I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a <>. — Muhammad Ali

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go . — John Stuart Mill

He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers "are always on the outside making stupid remarks," he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists. — James Gleick

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where. — Richard Davenport-Hines

There are not many secure hospitals that can boast someone who thought he was Napoleon, but St. Cerebellum's could field three - not to mention a handful of serial killers whose names inexplicably yet conveniently rhymed with their crimes. Notorious cannibal "Peter the Eater" was incarcerated here, as were "Sasha the Slasher" and "Mr. Browner the Serial Drowner." But the undisputed king of rhyme-inspired serial murder was Isle of Man resident Maximilian Marx, who went under the uniquely tongue-twisting epithet "Mad Max Marx, the Masked Manxman Axman." Deirdre Blott tried to top Max's clear superiority by changing her name so as to become "Nutty Nora Newsome, the Knife-Wielding Weird Widow from Waddersdon," but no one was impressed, and she was ostracized by the other patients for being such a terrible show-off. — Jasper Fforde

He'd want privacy for his Change and that wasn't vanity. I'm curious about
many things, but witnessing the human-to-wolf transformation isn't one of them.
"I'm going to try picking up visions," I said. "So try to keep the screams of agony to a minimum, okay?"
A muttered epithet. I grinned and walked to the sofa. — Kelley Armstrong

It was possible we looked out of sorts. And of course we were aware by now that Italians don't drive bright orange cars (or bright yellow or green cars for that matter) and that the owners of such cars are looked upon with a certain amount of condescension and immediately understood to be Germans, an epithet more or less synonymous with bad taste. — Tim Parks

Ah fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee. — Christopher Marlowe

Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art. The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor's epithet was Lady of the Sycamore. — Larry Gates

Epithet, n.
I think the worst you ever called me was a "cunt rag."
"You mean I'm a tampon?" I asked. "I'm a tampon for not letting you drive?"
I laughed. You didn't. At least, not until you sobered up. — David Levithan

Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Large eyes were admired in Greece, where they still prevail. They are the finest of all when they have the internal look, which is not common. The stag or antelope eye of the Orientals is beautiful and lamping, but is accused of looking skittish and indifferent. "The epithet of 'stag-eyed,'" says Lady Wortley Montgu, speaking of a Turkish love-song, "pleases me extremely; and I think it a very lively image of the fire and indifference in his mistress' eye. — Leigh Hunt

Barking spiders! — Scott Westerfeld

A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature ... — Rebecca Solnit

Well, of all the bacon-brained, sapskulled, squirish, buffle-headed nodcocks! — Patricia C. Wrede

Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells. — Jim Butcher

What praise is implied in the simple epithet useful! What reproach in the contrary. — David Hume

What an epithet can be derived from that - "Frivolous philologist!" For thirty years I have been waiting for a chance to use it, but every time I get into an argument with a savant, he turns out to be of some other persuasion - a psychologist, perhaps, or a podiatrist. The neck my knife would fit has never presented itself. — A.J. Liebling

And you, you worthless - ' he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash - . — Emily Bronte

Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure ... There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency. — Jeremy Bentham

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators. — George Bernard Shaw

Deficiency in judgement is properly that which is called stupidity; and for such a failing we know no remedy. A dull or narrow-minded person, to whom nothing is wanting but a proper degree of understanding, may be improved by tuition, even so far as to deserve the epithet of learned. But as such persons frequently labour under a deficiency in the faculty of judgement, it is not uncommon to find men extremely learned who in the application of their science betray a lamentable degree this irremediable want.] — Immanuel Kant

They that go down to the sea in ships' see strange things, but what they tell is oft-times stranger still. A faculty for romancing is imparted by a seafaring life as readily and surely as a rolling gait and a weather-beaten countenance. A fine imagination is one of the gifts of the ocean-witness the surprising and unlimited power of expression and epithet possessed by the sailor. And a fine imagination will frequently manifest itself in other ways besides swear words. — Gertrude Bacon

When he was thirteen, he used an anti-Semitic epithet to describe a Jewish friend. Thinking of the moment more than seven decades later, Bush volunteered the story and cried, shaken by guilt over a remark made in the 1930s. He shook his head in wonder at his own insensitivity. "Never forgotten it. Never forgotten it." (The classmate remained a Bush friend and supporter for many years.) — Jon Meacham

I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use. — Ralph Waldo Emerson