Old Filth Quotes & Sayings

Lazy in everything," said Ross, "but the search for excuses. Like two old pigs in their sty and as slow to move from their own patch of filth." Prudie — Winston Graham

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision
and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness,
more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort.
An Augean stable of metallic filth. — D.H. Lawrence

There were six men in Birmingham
In Guildford there's four
That were picked up and tortured
And framed by the law
And the filth got promotion
But they're still doing time
For being Irish in the wrong place
And at the wrong time

In Ireland they'll put you away in the Maze
In England they'll keep you for seven long days
God help you if ever you're caught on these shores
The coppers need someone
When they walk through that door

You'll be counting years
First five, then ten
Growing old in a lonely hell
Round the yard and a stinking cell
From wall to wall, and back again

A curse on the judges, the coppers and screws
Who tortured the innocent, wrongly accused
For the price of promotion
And justice to sell
May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell — Shane MacGowan

If the newspapers reported the truth, if they wrote about the mud and filth and the body parts littering the ground and how young men look old before their time, would we still be here? — M.K. Tod

In this context, fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world. This is not to say that concerns over environmental pollution are not justified - like filth theory, toxicity theory is anchored in legitimate dangers - but that the way we think about toxicity bears some resemblance to the way we once thought about filth. Both theories allow their subscribers to maintain a sense of control over their own health by pursuing personal purity. For the filth theorist, this meant a retreat into the home, where heavy curtains and shutters might seal out the smell of the poor and their problems. Our version of this shuttering is now achieved through the purchase of purified water, air purifiers, and food produced with the promise of purity. — Eula Biss

MIDWINTER IS THE DREARIEST of the year. Days are short, nights are long, and both are cold and wet with no immediate prospect of relief. Winter's Tail is what the old wives call it, dragging filth at winter's ass. — Ellen Kushner

Until you realize what they are. They're just ways to lose the game. You lose the game, and what have you lost? You've lost the game. Corion had told me about the game. How many of my thoughts were his? How much of my philosophy was filth from that old man's fingers? — Mark Lawrence

His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement. — Jane Gardam

Revolutionary war is an antitoxin that not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth. Every just, revolutionary war is endowed with tremendous power and can transform many things or clear the way for their transformation. The Sino-Japanese war will transform both China and Japan; provided China perseveres in the War of Resistance and in the united front, the old Japan will surely be transformed into a new Japan and the old China into a new China, and people and everything else in both China and Japan will be transformed during and after the war. — Mao Zedong

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in
The mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man ... — Tom Lehrer

Filth and old age, I'm sure you will agree, are powerful wardens upon chastity. — Geoffrey Chaucer

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! — Allen Ginsberg