Ignominious Quotes & Sayings

Don't tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to from his wife. Simply tell me how he makes his living. It is the safest and surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man. — H.L. Mencken

A handful of individual football stars - not necessarily the most talented, but those boasting good looks, beautiful wives and an animated private life - assumed a role in European public life and popular newspapers hitherto reserved for movie starlets or minor royalty. When David Beckham (an English player of moderate technical gifts but an unsurpassed talent for self-promotion) moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2003, it made headline television news in every member-state of the European Union. Beckham's embarrassing performance at the European Football Championships in Portugal the following year - the England captain missed two penalties, hastening his country's ignominious early departure - did little to dampen the enthusiasm of his fans. — Tony Judt

By this point in history - after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises - free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world's billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil. — Naomi Klein

In an American state prison or house of correction, I found it difficult at first to persuade myself that I was really in a jail: a place of ignominious punishment and endurance. And to this hour I very much question whether the humane boast that it is not like one, has its root in the true wisdom or philosophy of the matter. — Charles Dickens

It is quite as ignominious to allow oneself to be deceived as to deceive. — Christina, Queen Of Sweden

IGNOMINIOUS means shamefully weak and ineffective. Oliver Twist saying, "Please sir, might I have some more?" would be ignominious, except that he isn't shameful, just sort of pathetic. This book has ignominious illustrations. They are shamefully weak because the person who drew them is not an artist. — Lois Lowry

Freedom of Speech has become Freedom of Stupidity on the internet. Some ignominious users should not be given a voice to comment at all. — Michael P. Naughton

For them it's out-of-date and outmoded to perform miracles; teaching the people is too like hard work, interpreting the holy scriptures is for schoolmen and praying is a waste of time; to shed tears is weak and womanish, to be needy is degrading; to suffer defeat is a disgrace and hardly fitting for one who scarcely permits the greatest of kings to kiss the toes of his sacred feet; and finally, death is an unattractive prospect, and dying on a cross would be an ignominious end. — Desiderius Erasmus

The working of miracles is old and out-dated; to teach the people is too laborious; to interpret scripture is to invade the prerogative of the schoolmen; to pray is too idle; to shed tears is cowardly and unmanly; to fast is too mean and sordid; to be easy and familiar is beneath the grandeur of him, who, without being sued to and intreated, will scarce give princes the honour of kissing his toe; finally, to die for religion is too self-denying; and to be crucified as their Lord of Life, is base and ignominious. — Erasmus

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be.
He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began. — Salman Rushdie

I don't think that boxing historians have been able to find a case in which a great fighter, or a fighter presumed to be a great fighter, came to such an ignominious end. — Larry Merchant

The intersection of authoritarian politics with homoeroticism is a subject of some historical interest, from the Nazi enthusiasm for the sculptures of Josef Thorak and Arno Breker to the Italian Futurists' ritual rejection of all things feminine. That mostly petered out around the time Francisco Franco stopped rocking that fur in official portraiture, though it has made occasional ignominious appearances in Democratic politics too. But the combination of homoerotic fascination and gay panic that marks the Trump movement is truly remarkable, something unseen in American politics. It — Kevin D. Williamson

Labour was always aligned with the U.S. during the Cold War, but the ignominious implosion of communism reinforced the belief that no alternative to the prevailing common sense was possible. — Martin Jacques

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. — Herman Melville

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages. — H.L. Mencken

While the Romans languished under the ignominious tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius. — Edward Gibbon

I well recall my horror when I heard for the first time, of a journalist who had laid in a pair of what were then called bicycle pants and taken to golf; it was as if I had encountered a studhorse with his hair done up in frizzes, and pink bowknots peeking out of them. It seemed, in some vague way, ignominious, and even a bit indelicate. — H.L. Mencken

It seems proper, at all events, that by an early enactment similar to that of other countries the application of public money by an officer of Government to private uses should be made a felony and visited with severe and ignominious punishment. — Martin Van Buren

The biblical lifestyle is always a witness of resistance to the status quo in politics, economics, and all society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death - through execution, exile, imprisonment, persecution, defamation, or harassment - at the behest of the rulers of this age. Yet those who do not resist the rulers of the present darkness are consigned to a moral death, the death of their humanness. That, of all the ways of dying, is the most ignominious. — William Stringfellow

The Athenians, then, provided for a police in their new state, a veritable "force" of bowmen on foot and horseback. This police force consisted - of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service. That was still a sign of the old gentile spirit. The state could not exist without a police, but as yet it was too young and did not command sufficient moral respect to give prestige to an occupation that necessarily appeared ignominious to the old gentiles. How — Friedrich Engels

Capping this is the conception of the noble man, now no longer just a remnant nobleman who relies on birth and polite breeding to perpetuate an anachronistic social order, but a person whose largeness of soul triumphs over his ignominious lot and whose depth of practical wisdom enables him to become a teacher of men. — Wm Theodore De Bary

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs ... and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy. — Walter Benjamin

[T]he social relationship of young women to young men ... now seemed to Kitty like ignominious exposure of merchandise to be taken by the highest bidder. — Leo Tolstoy

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. — George Orwell

A normal woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never coalesce. Nor is she, susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very dramatically in them United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and ignominious defeat - The first general election in which all American women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised women voters voted against him. — H.L. Mencken

One of the more ignominious features of love was that you could only express it with cliches ... it made you sound like a fraud at a time when you were blazing with sincerity. — Lisa Kleypas

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organised a People's Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries - not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists. — Noam Chomsky

Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat. — George Bernard Shaw

A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately. — George Bernard Shaw

We were a bookish family. we loved our books, but before long they were lined up next to the stove and my mother and my uncle fought over which should go first and which should be saved to the very last. The Iliad was a beautiful first edition, the pride of our library, but it too went: Agamemnon, king of men, Nestor, flower of Achaean chivalry, the Black Ships, Patroclus' corpse, Helen's bracelets, Cassandra's shrieks, all met the flames, for he sake of two or three suppers. My uncle was loath to let Mark Twain go...Huckleberry Finn and his river did not deserve such an ignominious end. — Edna O'Brien

Heaven be praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop! She had not obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had seen her step off her strip of board into the waters of annihilation. — Virginia Woolf

I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C. — D.H. Lawrence

Said I, in scorn all burning hot,In rage and anger high,You ignominious idiot,Those wings are made to fly! — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The one thing Hugo did better than almost anyone else, the one constant for much of his life, was being taken away in a most ignominious way. — Craig Lancaster

God did not become flesh and suffer an ignominious death at our hands so that we could have sprawling church campuses, programs, and budgets. — Michael S. Horton

Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion. — Patrick O'Brian

[A historian] will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion: one hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared; ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same ignominious price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole works of Aristotle and Homer, the noblest productions of the sciences and literature of ancient Greece. — Edward Gibbon

How admirable and beautiful is the simplicity of the Evangelists! They never speak injuriously of the enemies of Jesus Christ, of His judges, nor of His executioners. They report the facts without a single reflection. They comment neither on their Master's mildness when He was smitten, nor on His constancy in the hour of His ignominious death, which they thus describe: And they crucified Jesus. — Jean Racine

It was another of the Great Bastards: Ser Aegor Rivers, called Bittersteel. Perhaps it was his Bracken blood that made Aegor so choleric and so quick to take offense. Perhaps it was the ignominious fall of the — George R R Martin

My conscience is killing me, isn't it? And when you're immortal that can be a really long and ignominious death — Anne Rice

Given the sin of impiety through which they [the Romans] sinned against the divine nature [by idolatry], the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed ... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies [by idolatry] the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil ... — Thomas Aquinas

A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one's soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print and dead man's sentiment. Would it not be better, finer, braver to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free untrammelled illiterate Superman? — Cornelia Funke

Continually measuring women's wants by men's achievements seems out of date, ignominious, and intolerably boring ... Now that we have secured possession of the tools of citizenship, we intend to use them not to copy men's models but to produce our own. — Eleanor Rathbone

She resolved, at forty-some, that since she herself must die, she would do it as gracefully as possible, as free as possible from vomitings, moans, the ignominy of basins, bedsores, and enemas, not to mention the intenser ignominious dependence of weak knees and various torments of the troubled mind. — M.F.K. Fisher

To die is to move on with the invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to live mechanized and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanized life. Life indeed may be ignominious, shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying. — D.H. Lawrence

Ignominious grave, and I the cause! A thousand times — Mary Shelley

The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace. — H.L. Mencken

But me
They cannot touch,
Old age and death.the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk! — Adelaide Crapsey

So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish. — Margaret Atwood

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. — H.L. Mencken

This police force consisted--of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than lending himself to such an ignominious service. — Friedrich Engels

One of the possible reasons why we might be good is that we're frightened, frightened of God. We want the reward in Heaven, we don't want to go to Hell. That would be an ignoble, ignominious reason for being good, and I think that if anybody was good to you just because they hoped for a heavenly reward, you wouldn't respect them, you'd probably give them a wide berth. — Richard Dawkins