Parasitical Quotes & Sayings

An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill — Theodore Levitt

Napoleon has still retained a train of parasitical satellites. — Alexandre Dumas

They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em — Zack De La Rocha

I'm not a vomit in the club kinda girl. — Lady Gaga

If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary. — Ayn Rand

Commerce, which is mistakenly classified among the productive forms of work, ought to be ranked first among the parasitical professions like those of monk, soldier, lawyer etc. — Charles Fourier

No matter how high are one's estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that:
a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid.
b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one's activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments. — Carlo M. Cipolla

Funny how you never hear novelists or painters say they work in the 'creative industries', but only squalid little advertising people. How could this be? (.....)

If you listen to advertisers, you'd think they're the fucking Oracle and that for a fee they'll slip you the Answer. They are obsessed with being seen as 'creative', but what they do seems rather to be 'parasitical' : pinching cultural innovations and using them to persuade people that they want stuff. So there's a dilemma for us all to think 'creatively' about. — Steve Lowe

My fear was that I'd oversleep, and when Ranger broke into my apartment to wake me up, I'd drag him into bed with me. And then what would I tell Joe? — Janet Evanovich

In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth. The former peacetime aspect of the place was barely discernible. The village pond was where the dragoons watered their horses, infantry exercised in the orchards, soldiers lay in the meadows sunning themselves. All the peacetime institutions collapsed, only what was needed for war remained. Hedges and fences were broken or simply torn down for easier access, and everywhere there were large signs giving directions to military traffic. While roofs caved in, and furniture was gradually used up as firewood, telephone lines and electricity cables were installed. Cellars were extended outwards and downwards to make bomb shelters for the residents; the removed earth was dumped in the gardens. The village no longer knew any demarcations or distinctions between thine and mine.
pp. 36-37 — Ernst Junger

Englishmen Francis Galton to describe the "science" of bettering human stock and the elimination of unwanted characteristics ... and individuals. Galton proposed societal intervention for the furtherance of "racial quality," maintaining that "Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations" and that "except by sterilization I cannot yet see any way of checking the produce of the unfit who are allowed their liberty and are below the reach of moral control. — Francis Galton

I don't want to interview people for the purpose of developing a world view and pushing that on people. — Brandon Stanton

Meditation is the journey from sound to silence, from movement to stillness, from a limited identity to unlimited space. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Look at what I am proposing, and we [wih Bernie Sanders] have a vigorous agreement here. We both want to reign in the excesses of Wall Street. I also want to reign in the excesses of Johnson Controls that we bailed out when they were an autoparts company, and we saved the auto industry, and now they want to avoid paying taxes. — Hillary Clinton

Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed. — Hannah Arendt

In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave. — George Orwell

I wasn't like those girls who give birth and are back on the runway. It took me probably six months to gain 45 pounds and I would say it took me double that time to lose it. — Padma Lakshmi

It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities ... interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible ... — Carl Jung

They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According — Mary Karr

(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity. — Shulamith Firestone

If your friend's friend's friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too. — James H. Fowler

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman ... — Oswald Spengler

Women are like parasitical plants, casting their wild tendrils from one tree to another, till, swollen into tough cordage, they strangle those they embrace, and luxuriate in their decay. — Edward John Trelawny

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen. — George Gilder

He who lives without folly is not as wise as he may think. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

In wrestling, nothing exists unless it exists totally, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is given exhaustively; leaving nothing in shadow, the gesture severs every parasitical meaning and ceremonially presents the public with a pure and full signification, three dimensional, like Nature. Such emphasis is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is enacted by wrestling, then, is an ideal intelligence of things, a euphoria of humanity, raised for a while out of the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and installed in a panoramic vision of a univocal Nature, in which signs finally correspond to causes without obstacle, without evasion, and without contradiction. — Roland Barthes

Pick on our clients, will you, you parasitical, piratical, putrefied parcels of puking pus-filled perverts. — Anne McCaffrey

Stories don't care who takes part in them. All that matters if that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself. — Terry Pratchett

There are now, to the delight of parasitical writers like me, what I might almost call "public domain" plot items. There are dragons, and magic users, and far horizons, and quests, and items of power, and weird cities. There's the kind of scenery that we would have had on earth if only God had had the money. — Terry Pratchett

Have been slowly making up my mind, seriously & quietly. Either I am loathsome to others, I have decided, or else I shall be a beacon of rich warm light, spreading good and plenty, making things prosper, being a cosmic architect, conquering the world and being respected, myself grinning surreptitiously. Either that, Sirs, or I shall be the most loathsome, useless, and parasitical (on myself) creature in the world. I shall be a denizen of the Underground, or a successful man of the world. There shall be no compromise!!! I mean it. — Jack Kerouac

I don't try to show off technology in my work. The technology is a means to tell stories, so I think conversations about my work can be had by very large audiences. — Marco Tempest

My love affair with (him) had a wonderful element of romance to it, which I will always cherish. But it was not an infatuation, and here's how I can tell: because I did not demand that he become my Great Emancipator or my Source of All Life, nor did I immediately vanish into that man's chest cavity like a twisted, unrecognizable, parasitical homonculus. During our long period of courtship, I remained intact within my own personality, and I allowed myself to meet (him) for who he was. — Elizabeth Gilbert

This is one of the truths of the influence industry in Britain: lobbyists are central to the process of government. To see lobbyists as separate and external to the system is a mistake. Rather than being parasitical, lobbyists should more accurately be viewed as essential to it, subsidising it even. As lobbying activity has increased, so our government has become ever more dependent on lobbyists to function. 'Our vaunted constitution is really a framework of lobbying', Austin Mitchell MP remarked twenty years ago.18 — Tamasin Cave

Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. — Walter Benjamin