Incendiary Quotes & Sayings

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages. — Tom Morello

The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut

When I turned pro, I made a vow to myself never to bow to PR bullshit, to never be untrue to myself, and I'm proud to say that I've never really deviated from that principle - often with some fairly incendiary results. Having — Cavendish Mark

Prosecutors insist they are mounting a "thorough investigation," which sometimes means thorough and sometimes, historically, has meant long enough to let the fire burn down in an incendiary case. A thorough investigation is fine; an interminable one is disgraceful. — Anna Quindlen

Actors are by nature volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster. — M.L. Rio

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match. — Erica Jong

It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up. I don't know if memoirists as children are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ourselves. Like everybody, I suppose, people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them, and we broke our own hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes. — Mary Karr

People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that has always been the image of a lunatic. — Robert Musil

Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of "human material," the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way. — Walter Benjamin

For if thought that exceeds what has yet been
thought were not possible, the infinite would not be possible, and self/
itself or subjectivity its intermediary transcendence/ incendiary. — Erin Moure

But the silent majority and I do have one memorial, at least. The Disaster. We have small lives, easily lost in foreign droughts, or famines; the occasional incendiary incident, or a wall of pale faces, crushed against grillwork, one Saturday afternoon in Spring. This is not enough. — A. L. Kennedy

But there was a cost. Being near Ethan was just ... incendiary. Part animosity, part ridiculous chemistry, neither conducive to a peaceful home environment. And this was only my first night under his thumb. Not a good sign of things to come. — Chloe Neill

For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire. Unfortunately he again and again finds hirelings who open the gates of their country to this international incendiary. (Referring to Winston Churchill) — Adolf Hitler

Flares and small incendiary bombs began to fall as the car approached Kreuzberg. The neighborhood was a typical target for the RAF's current strategy of killing as many civilian factory workers as possible. With staggering hypocrisy Churchill and Attlee were claiming they attacked only military targets, and civilian casualties were a regrettable side effect. Berliners knew better. — Ken Follett

Fear is a communicable disease; it comes out in the sweat and passes from host to host. Fear is an incendiary agent; it combusts with stupidity. — Brian McGreevy

Venice is ever the fragile labyrinth at the edge of the sea and it reminds us how brief and perilous the journeys of our lives are; perhaps that is why we love it so. City of plagues and brief liaisons, city of lingering deaths and incendiary loves, city of chimeras, nightmares, pigeons, bells. You are the only city in the world whose dialect has a word for the shimmer of canal water reflected on the ceiling of a room. — Erica Jong

Sometimes, just the act of venting is helpful. Counseling provides a safe haven for precisely that kind of free-ranging release: You can say things in the therapist's office, with the therapist present, that would be incendiary or hurtful in your living room. — Laura Wasser

You watched and you saw what happened and in the accumulation of episodes you saw the pattern: Daddy ruled the roost, called the shots, made the money, made the decisions, so you signed up on his side, and fifteen years later when the women's movement came along with its incendiary manifestos telling you to avoid marriage and motherhood, it was as if somebody put a match to a pile of dry kindling. — Anne Taylor Fleming

...because the guy was oblivious, anyway, he was so into what he was doing: rooting through the ranks of rubbish, sorting it out, putting some on the central worktable, then moving some of that selected shit around, stacking it, arraying it, then circulating around the table and sizing the shitpile up, from different angles, with incendiary eyes ... ; and then, the next evening, I saw there was more shit, the guy must have been bringing it in... — Evan Dara

I was a boy that age once, and I know that 97.7 percent of their bodies are semen and the 2.8 percent is an incendiary device for spraying it. — Mat Johnson

Truth is, most of us contain a splashing, giggling, squealing child who knows without thinking that bare skin and water go together as wings go with air, roots with earth, and the phoenix with incendiary sun. And innocence belongs to us as it did to ancient Greek athletes, who never wore clothes for their footraces or boxing matches but rather oiled themselves until their nude bodies glistened in the sunlight. — Janet Lembke

When the shingles hissed
in the rain incendiary,
other values were revealed to us — Hilda Doolittle

It's a tribal state, and it always will be. Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it's now or years from now, we'll have an incendiary situation. Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don't think that serves our strategic interests. — Jon Huntsman Jr.

What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality. — Philip Kaufman

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars. — Anthony Doerr

An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo! — Jim Butcher

I think I finally understand the saying like a moth to a flame. I'm the moth. My heart flutters like the paper thin wings. And he is the flame, incendiary, scorching my soul.
He inhales so heavily, like he's been holding his breath under water. He presses his lips against mine and tugs at my hair gently. My head falls back and my mouth falls open. His tongue, slick as silver, dances with mine.
I'm wrong. I'm not a moth. I'm Icarus and I've flown too close to the sun. — A.D. Evans

I thought it would fix everything, but it just made everything worse. Lies do. Remember when I told you white lies were like ball bearings in the machinery of society? Wrong. Lies are like incendiary bombs, burning and melting and mangling everything- trust, hopes, everyone you love. — Sarah Sundin

Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever. — Anais Nin

Incendiary capitalism is carrying its out evil works more dangerously than ever, and is doing so in the increasingly dangerous neighborhood of the powder kegs that are the great European military powers. — Karl Liebknecht

What the hell do you call that?" I asked him quietly. "Firefog?"
"We could," he responded. "Kilvin would probably call it an atmospherically enhanced incendiary action. — Patrick Rothfuss

I could just as easily have taken the train.
He shut his eyes, just long enough for a movie of a Tess-induced train riot to screen on the backs of his eyelids. Fists flying, teeth broken, friendships destroyed as men vied to get closer to her lush body barely covered in that incendiary French maid outfit.
And now he was turning hard again. — Kate Meader

They regarded each other. Adam fair and cautious, Ronan dark and incendiary. This was Ronan at his most truthful. — Maggie Stiefvater

The attraction between them was incendiary, yet somehow twelve years ago she'd walked away from as if he meant nothing. — Katie Reus

According to Keltar legend, each Druid born into the clan was destined for a soul mate, a perfect match in heart and mind, as well as body, coming together with an explosive, incendiary passion that could not be denied. If the Keltar male exchanged the sacred Druid binding vows with his true love, and his mate willingly returned them, they could bind their souls together for all eternity, in this life and forever beyond. The vows linked them inextricably. 'Twas said if a Keltar gave the vows and they were not returned, he would be forever incomplete, missing a part of his heart, aching for the love of a woman he could never have, eternally bound to her, through this life and all his future existence, whether in the cycle of rebirth, heaven, hell, or even an eternal Unseelie prison. If aught must be lost ... the legendary vows began, 'twill be my life for yours ... — Karen Marie Moning

Incendiary

That one small boy with a face like pallid cheese
And burnt-out little eyes could make a blaze
As brazen, fierce and huge, as red and gold
And zany yellow as the one that spoiled
Three thousand guineas' worth of property
And crops at Godwin's Farm on Saturday
Is frightening---as fact and metaphor:
An ordinary match intended for
The lighting of a pipe or kitchen fire
Misused may set a whole menagerie
Of flame-fanged tigers roaring hungrily.
And frightening, too, that one small boy should set
The sky on fire and choke the stars to heat
Such skinny limbs and such a little heart
Which would have been content with one warm kiss
Had there been anyone to offer this. — Vernon Scannell

My role as Ewan McGregor's girlfriend in the film 'Incendiary' ended up on the cutting-room floor, but at least I had two brilliant days of acting with Ewan. — Natalie Dormer

Smoke and mirrors' is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon. — Michael Salter

Though in fairness, before tonight she wouldn't have known exactly how to classify them. Sorta childhood friends through her brother, turned business rivals who had absolutely incendiary chemistry when they let it loose, which was almost never. Yeah, that wasn't unclear at all ... Sarcasm. Kady's second-favorite - asm. — Laura Kaye

Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he had been commissioned to spend his own in undisturbed judgement of the world about him, protected always by a mandate from the gods. They spoke briefly of Korea and then of the past war with the United States. Miyata had been in Japan for its entire duration and must have been deeply affected, but when he talked about it, it was without bitterness. Wars were not of his doing. He considered them almost poetically, as if they were seasons, the cruel winters of man, even though almost all the work he had done in the 1930s and early 1940s had been lost when his house was burned in the great incendiary raid of 1944. He described the night vividly, the endless hours, the bombers thundering low over the storms of fire. — James Salter

Not only a fanatic and an incendiary (two of the insults that dogged Defoe most closely in his lifetime), the author of Robinson Crusoe was also an egregious spiv, and a slave to bling. — Daniel Defoe

A customs man at JFK had asked them to open the suitcases (in case they were smuggling in Indian fruits or sweets, perhaps). 'Ulysses!' the large bespectacled disbelieving customs man had said. 'Are you a student?' Ananda had nodded, though he was in the equivalent of high school. 'I wouldn't read Ulysses unless I was a student!' said the customs man, shutting the suitcase after his glimpse into the tantalising freemasonry of studenthood. A potentially incendiary book then - on the verge of being, but not quite, contraband. And near-unreadable. Ananda — Amit Chaudhuri

In we go, then," Dee said.
"We can't go in there," Roland said, moving away from the church.
"Oh, yes," Dee said, "the incendiary business. You think you can't go in because it's a sanctuary of God-"
"It's the sanctuary of God," Roland said. "I don't want to be the guy who takes this place down. — Lauren Kate

Ronan's expression was still incendiary. His code of honor left no room for infidelity, for casual relationships. It wasn't that he didn't condone them; he couldn't understand — Maggie Stiefvater

I echoed his groan as I pushing into him, fast and hard, knowing now that we were both burning, burning, my nipples and his ass, and Jesus, wasn't that a metaphor for whatever was happening between us? I was just on fire for him, in a way I'd never been before, for his pale skin and dark hair and red lips, for both the fucking incendiary raunch and the heartbreaking sensitivity that came in turns from his brilliant artist's mind. — Amelia C. Gormley

There are five kinds of incendiary attack: The first is called setting fire to personnel; the second, to stores; the third, to transport vehicles and equipment; the fourth, to munitions; the fifth, to supply installations ... In all cases an army must understand the changes induced by the five kinds of incendiary attack, and make use of logistical calculations to address them. — Sun Tzu

Malick to Jacin: There is no trade anymore, you're not nothing, you didn't kill Caidi, you're going to be the most beautiful-dangerous Incendiary the gods have ever seen, and I fucking love you. Deal with it. — Carole Cummings

Nothing is more incendiary to an ill-advised, unanticipated tryst than to be enclosed in a darkened, plush-upholstered, moving chamber. Privacy, Intimacy, Darkness, Transience: the Four Whorsemen of the Apocalypse. — John MacLachlan Gray

Democratic politicians, liberal activists and liberal news outlets routinely deploy incendiary rhetoric and wicked accusations to marginalize Republicans. — Gary Bauer

And in the incendiary wake of Michael Brown's and Eric Garner's deaths at the hands of white police officers in the summer of 2014, a conventional production of Driving Miss Daisy that in no way subverts the text now seems nothing short of obscene. There — Jordan Tannahill

Politics has become incendiary. People don't find it so funny now so I have to be careful, but I have to wake them up with some truths and the truths I aim at them are over 100 years old. Facts that no one can dispute. — Hal Holbrook

Better to be always in a minority of one with God - branded as madman, incendiary, fanatic, heretic, infidel - frowned upon by "the powers that be," and mobbed by the populace - or consigned ignominiously to the gallows, like him whose "soul is marching on," though his "body lies mouldering in the grave," or burnt to ashes at the stake like Wickliffe, or nailed to the cross like him who "gave himself for the world," - in defence of the RIGHT, than like Herod, having the shouts of a multitude crying, "It is the voice of a god, and not of a man! — William Lloyd Garrison

Paine knew that class tensions existed. He understood that revolutions stirred up resentments. In Common Sense, he adopted an ominous tone at a key point in his argument, warning readers that the time was ripe to declare independence and form a stable government. Or else. In the current state of things, "the mind of the multitude is left at random," he wrote, and "the property of no man is secure." Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling. — Nancy Isenberg

At her incendiary words, he drove deeper - far deeper - into her, unable to help himself.

"So," she said, her fingers on his cheek, "now I've made you mine."

He took her fingers in hand and kissed them one by one. "You made me yours long ago, but now you finally claimed me. — Sherry Thomas

Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh's whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it is incendiary. Yes, it is ugly. — Michael Steele

I played a security guard, and I think it was in the State Department. This was my first acting role, really, and I remember rehearsing it on the couch with my girlfriend at the time. I had a real problem with saying the word "incendiary." Most of my rehearsal was spent on pronouncing the word "incendiary." — Kevin Nealon

That atomic energy though harnessed by American scientists and army men for destructive purposes may be utilised by other scientists for humanitarian purposes is undoubtedly within the realm of possibility ... An incendiary uses fire for his destructive and nefarious purpose, a housewife makes daily use of it in preparing nourishing food for mankind. — Mahatma Gandhi

I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades. — Suzanne Finnamore

And like in a movie I appear in front of the D'Agostino's, sale's clerks beckoning for me to enter, and I'm using an expired coupon for a box of oat-bran cereal and the girl at the checkout counter
black, dumb,slow
doesn't get it, doesn't notice the expiration date has passed even though it's the only thing I buy, and I get a small but incendiary thrill when I walk out of the store, opening the box, stuffing handfuls of the cereal into my mouth, trying to whistle "Hips to Be Square". — Bret Easton Ellis

It is high time that we had lights that are not incendiary torches. — George Sand

Whether or not you agreed with the group's incendiary style, one thing most people will agree on: N.W.A had a deep, trans-formative and lasting effect on hip hop ideology. — Carlos Wallace