Most Outrageous Quotes & Sayings

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades. — Umberto Eco

He was a thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of me and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at arms- this nation has produced. -William Manchester on Douglas MacArthur — William Manchester

In my view, there is nothing more vicious and outrageous than the abuse, exploitation and harm of the most vulnerable members of our society, and I firmly believe that our nation's laws and resources need to reflect the seriousness of these terrible crimes. — Bob Ney

Of all insults, the temporary condescension of a master to a slave is the most outrageous and galling. That potentate who most condescends, mark him well; for that potentate, if occasion come, will prove your uttermost tyrant. — Herman Melville

Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind. — Seth Shostak

To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron's I can think of. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might. — Mark Twain

Judy Miller is the most innocent person in this case. I really thought that was outrageous that she was jailed and we needed as journalists to draw a line in the sand in a strong but thoughtful way. — Tom Brokaw

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction. — R.D. Laing

The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need. — Margery Allingham

He that puts on a religious habit abroad to gain himself a great name among men, and at the same time lives like an atheist at home, shall at the last be uncovered by God and presented before all the world for a most outrageous hypocrite. — Thomas Brooks

I have heard the most fantastical gossip about myself and each time I thought, "If only my life were that exciting, fun, outrageous, and sexy". Then again my memory wasn't so sharp when I took drugs. Some of what was said about me might be true. At worst it gave me jerk-off material. — Aiden Shaw

Booze is the most outrageous of drugs which is why I chose it. — Peter O'Toole

You know when you're by yourself you can say the most outrageous things. No one is listening. — Art Hochberg

Cry havoc, and let slip the trousers of most outrageous bonkilation! — Christopher Moore

I think up until '71 or '72, Herman's Hermits had our second and third Number One records in 1969 and 1970. You know, the first one was in 1964. It was just a question of the American success being so outrageous, that that attracted the most attention. — Peter Noone

For the most part, Ranger had a consistent personality.
He wasn't a guy who wasted a lot of unnecessary energy and effort. He moved and he spoke with an efficient ease that was more animal than human. And he didn't telegraph his emotions. Unless Ranger had his tongue in my mouth it was usually impossible to tell what he was thinking. But every now and then, Ranger would step out of the box, and like a little treat that was doled out on special occasions, Ranger would make an entirely outrageous sexual statement.
At least it would be outrageous coming from an ordinary guy ... from Ranger it seemed on the mark. — Janet Evanovich

He had never seen a woman look like that, he thought, fascinated despite his worry for Henry. She had tied back her outrageous hair and wrapped her head carefully in a cloth like a Negro slave woman. With her face so exposed, the delicate bones made stark, the intentness of her expression
with those yellow eyes darting like a hawk's from one thing to another
was the most unwomanly thing he had ever seen. It was the look of a general marshaling his troops for battle, and seeing it, he felt the ball of snakes in his belly relax a little.
She knows what she's doing, he thought.
She looked at him then, and he straightened his shoulders, instinctively awaiting orders
to his utter amazement. — Diana Gabaldon

To measure your needs by that which is projected via mass media is a mistake that has no mercy. The average person views a minimum of one thousand advertisements a day. To say "no" to the most outrageous commercials is an act of responsibility that needs to be taught early and often. — Haki R. Madhubuti

I am just the most boring person you will ever meet. I'm the good Southern daughter. I'm not outrageous. — Toni Tennille

But mostly, I remembered what I've always believed. What my mom taught me. That while some things are just plain awful, most things in life can be seen either tragic or comic. And it's your choice. Is life a big, long, tiresome slog from sadness to regret to guilt to resentment to self-pity? Or is life weird, outrageous, bizarre, ironic, and just stupid?
Gotta go with stupid.
It's not the easy way out. Self-pity is the easiest thing in the world. Finding the humor, the irony, the slight justification for a skewed, skeptical optimism, that's tough. — Katherine Applegate

We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken in two: others, like himself, and those to be used. He will never realize that he still has all of his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again. — Derrick Jensen

You might hide in some Freudian jungle most of your miserable life, baying at the moon and shouting curses at God, but at the end, right down there at the damned end when it counts ... you would sure as anything clear up just enough to realize the moon you have spent so many years baying at is nothing but the light globe up there on the ceiling, and God is just something placed in your bureau drawer by the Gideon Society. Yes, I sighed again, in the long run insanity would be the same old coldhearted drag of too solid flesh, too many slings and arrows, and too much outrageous fortune. — Ken Kesey

He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. — William Manchester

Philip Wyndham! That is the most inappropriate thing I have ever heard, and if your mother were here she would give you the scolding of your life! In fact, I have half a mind to go tell her what an atrocious, incorrigible, scandalous tease she has raised." He didn't look the least bit chagrined. He just smiled and said, "If my mother were here I wouldn't have said it. That was for your ears only." And then he winked. I stared at him in disbelief. There was no stopping him. He had no limits to how far he would go with his outrageous flirting. — Julianne Donaldson

Even the man whom we think we know best . . . is at bottom a stranger to us. He is different. The most we can do, and the best, is to have at least some inkling of his otherness, to respect it, and to guard against the outrageous stupidity of wishing to interpret it (1928, p. 220-221). — Anonymous

Often it is hard. So hard, in fact, that Jesus' decree to love and pray for our opponents is regarded as one of the most breathtaking and gut-wrenching challenges of his entire Sermon on the Mount, a speech renowned for its outrageous claims. There was no record of any other spiritual leader ever having articulated such a clear-cut, unambiguous command for people to express compassion to those who are actively working against their best interests. — Lee Strobel

The best part about being a superstar is that you can wear the most outrageous of clothes and they say 'it's in!' — Amitabh Bachchan

The emotions of the ignorant man are continuously kept at a pitch by the most blood-curdling stories about Anarchism. Not a thing too outrageous to be employed against this philosophy and its exponents. Therefore Anarchism represents to the unthinking what the proverbial bad man does to the child,-a black monster bent on swallowing everything; in short, destruction and violence. — Emma Goldman

The maplewood flat-finished Martin had represented the most outrageous luxury in her life when she bought it in 1971 for four hundred dollars. But Lonnie Slocum assured her the Martin was a good investment, even if she never learned to play it better than an acid head who was into heavy metal. — Dan Jenkins

What's the most outrageous thing I've ever done? Let's just say I don't think I've done it yet. The most outrageous thing is yet to come. — Steve Albini

Who, precisely, are your Dreamers? Are their Dreams in Technicolor? Do you allow their most Outrageous Dreams to be seen in public? — Tom Peters

I just wrote a really cool script. It's called "One Track Mind." It's an origin story about the most successful and the most foul-mouthed, outrageous songwriter in history. — Catherine Hardwicke

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do? — Will Self

Most of the humor comes from how outrageous the situations and circumstances are. — Mark Wahlberg

Some of my most outrageous nights- I can only believe actually happened because of corroborating evidence. No wonder I'm famous for partying! The ultimate party- if it's any good- you can't remember it. — Keith Richards

I have thousands and thousands of hats. Some are the most outrageous hats in the world. They are my disguise. I hide beneath them. — Larry Hagman

The most outrageous thing we can do in this world is to accept what happens and fly with it. — Sakyong Mipham

Why on earth would we spend our entire effort - sacrificing lives and time and immense amounts of money - to run an organization that wants the world to end? What would be the point? If we want to rule humanity, don't you think we'd want there to be a place for them to live? It's insane to think we want the Cataclysm to happen. It's outrageous and most definitely not intelligent.
- Tilda — James Dashner

The more science learns, the clearer it is that although we are here, we shouldn't be. Once we begin considering the details of it all, the towering odds against our existence begin to become a bit unsettling. When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing. — Eric Metaxas

Let's move forward to try to address the most egregious and outrageous corrupting aspect of campaigns in America today and that is the incredible inundation of soft money and its pernicious effects. — John McCain

As women glide from their twenties to thirties, Shazzer argues, the balance of power subtly shifts. Even the most outrageous minxes lose their nerve, wrestling with the first twinges of existential angst: fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. — Helen Fielding

I open the orangutan's door and set a pan of fruits, vegetables, and nuts on the floor. As I close it, her long arm reaches through the bars. She points at an orange in another pan.
'That? You want that?'
She continues to point, blinking at me with close-set eyes. Her features are concave, her face a wide platter fringed with red hair. She's the most outrageous and beautiful thing I've ever seen.
'Here,' I say, handing her the orange. 'You can have it.'
She takes it and sets it on the floor. Then she reaches out again. After several seconds of serious misgivings, I hold out my hand. She wraps her long fingers around it, then lets go. She sits on her haunches and peels her orange.
I stare in amazement. She was thanking me. — Sara Gruen

The most outrageous shoe that I had to do was a shoe where the person gave me stones - precious stones - and say that I could do anything with precious stones. — Christian Louboutin

I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things. — Michael Carbonaro

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. — Henry Miller

The farm labor movement saw him as a racist. He seemed to delight in the most outrageous snubs. Farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez was in the governor's outer office, waiting to plead against a bill outlawing unions on Arizona farms, as Governor Williams was inside his office signing the bill. That action launched a recall effort against Williams in the mid-seventies - a drive that apparently collected the required signatures but was subverted when the Republican attorney general found a nitpicking technicality that disqualified most of the petitions. This was the man who held the fate of Winnie Ruth Judd in his hands. — Jana Bommersbach

Now Speaker Gingrich says interesting and insightful things. He can explain them well. On many occasions he also says outrageous things that come from nowhere and he has a tendency to say them at exactly the time when they most undermine the conservative agenda. — Jim Talent

For Uncle Giles had been relegated by most of the people who knew him at all well to that limbo where nothing is expected of a person, and where more than usually outrageous actions are approached, at least conversationally, as if they constituted a series of practical jokes, more or less enjoyable, according to where responsibility for clearing up matters might fall. The curious thing about persons regarding whom society has taken this largely self-defensive measure is that the existence of the individual himself reaches a pitch when nothing he does can ever be accepted as serious. — Anthony Powell

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. — Thomas Ligotti

The closest most people have ever come to understanding what an investment banker does may have been on October 24, 1995, when they heard the outrageous special interest story of the day. The wire services released the story first. It was quickly picked up and parroted by almost every major media outlet in the country as a classic example of Wall Street excess. A fifty-eight-year-old frustrated managing director from Trust Company of the West, on an airplane trip from Buenos Aires to New York City, downed an excessive number of cocktails, got out of his seat in the first-class cabin of a United Airlines flight, dropped his pants, and took a crap
on the service cart. There you have it. That's what bankers do: consume, process, and disseminate. — Peter Troob

The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves
that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well. — Kurt Vonnegut

Six months ago he was a perfectly ordinary failed wizard. Then he met Twoflower, was employed at an outrageous salary as his guide, and has spent most of the intervening time being shot at, terrorised, chased and hanging from high places with no hope for salvation, or as is now the case, dropping from high places. — Terry Pratchett

Many young people adopt pleasures for which they have not the least taste, only because they are called by that name ... You mustallow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure. Gaming, that draws you into a thousand scraps, leaves you penniless, and gives you the air and manners of an outrageous madman, is another most exquisite pleasure, is it not? As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one's nose, the total destruction of health, and, not unfrequently, the being run through the body. — Lord Chesterfield

It seemed outrageous to hope that fertility, resources, time, desire, and love could all come together in the right way, and yet most women did eventually walk that path. — Hope Jahren

You find the most outrageous deviants in the countries with the most authoritarian systems. — Amelie Nothomb

Are you firing him?" Her voice squeaked as if she had uttered the most outrageous profanity. Voiced the great unspoken. The mere suggestion of firing Richard Troy was the theatrical equivalent of hollering "Voldemort!" in the halls of Hogwarts. — Lucy Parker

Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous. — Tony Hendra

If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence. — Victor Hugo

He asked himself ... whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration. — Victor Hugo

We are accused here of polygamy, and actions the most indelicate, obscene, and disgusting, such that none but a corrupt and depraved heart could have contrived. These things are too outrageous to admit to belief ... — John Taylor

People live their lives thinking that they are forgotten, and that is why we do the most outrageous things, so as not to go unnoticed — Rawi Hage

In one of the army's most outrageous Jim Crow episodes, an order came down at a Pennsylvania camp warning that "any association between the colored soldiers and white women, whether voluntary or not, would be considered rape. And the penalty would be death." After howls of protest from William H. Hastie, the civilian aide to the war secretary, and the NAACP, the War Department revoked the order. — Linda Hervieux

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. — Logan Pearsall Smith

The most outrageous tale you can tell is somebody's truth. — Marty Rubin

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous. — Nevada Barr

It's intriguing to observe so many of the outrageous prophecies, made with such biting satire years ago in the first edition, come into being through the craft of so many self-entitled egomaniacs running a global 'corpornation' for personal interest and professional profit. I had no idea then, as I now know, that I was writing with so much understatement. Honest outrage and political satire are two of the most important weapons that we have to protect infringement against our personal freedoms through oligarchy and to maintain any semblance of humanity in our democracy as our government aggressively privatizes and over-reaches at the expense of those millions whom it has sworn so dishonestly to serve and has utterly abandoned. — David B. Lentz

Ismail Merchant was just the most seductive, passionate, outrageous, driven, genius of a man. — Glenn Close