Self Mockery Quotes & Sayings

If there is to be responsible party government, the party label must be something more than a mere device for securing office. Unless those who are elected under the same party designation are willing to assume sufficient responsibility and exhibit sufficient loyalty and coherence, so that they can cooperate with each other in the support of the broad general principles, of the party platform, the election is merely a mockery, no decision is made at the polls, and there is no representation of the popular will. — Calvin Coolidge

To live an oversized life is to make a mockery of your destiny. Many can't prosper because the life they are living is bigger than them. — Patience Johnson

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history
the very things, he says, that are most natural to him. — Don DeLillo

Religion is an idea, and, as an idea, it should be eligible for criticism, discussion, and yes, mockery. The only reason so many believers demand special exceptions be made for religious ideas is because they know full well that their ideas don't hold up well under scrutiny. — Amanda Marcotte

As a man is, so is his God; therefore God was so often an object of mockery.
[Ger., Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gott,
Darum ward Gott so oft zu Spott.] — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Whatever hinders us from receiving a blessing that God is willing to bestow upon us is not humility, but the mockery of it. A genuine humility will ever feel the need of the largest measures of grace, and will be perfected just in the degree in which that grace is bestowed. The truly humble man will seek to be filled with all the fullness of God, knowing that when so filled there is not the slightest place for pride or for self. — George Bowen

Over the years, I have developed a visceral reaction to families and victims expressing surprise at tragedy. Why are we surprised? Why do we forget we are mortal? Bad, bad things happen everywhere, every day. Humans, for better or worse, harbor this feeling that we - individually - are special. A patch of ice or a pea-sized blood clot makes a mockery of that illusion in a heartbeat. We are not special at all. — Michael Perry

The problem with confronting people who make these comments is that the most you will get out of it is mockery and reprisal by superiors. You are just one girl who got offended by the comment, while so many others adhere to it. — Kaitlyn Scarboro

We're looking at such enormous complexity and variety that it makes a mockery of "celebrating diversity." In the L.A. of the future, no one will need to say, "Let's celebrate diversity." Diversity is going to be a fundamental part of our lives. That's what it's going to mean to be modern. — Richard Rodriguez

Pride and ego makes a mockery of an apology. Humility wins forgiveness without question ... so break 'yo'self'! — T.F. Hodge

Unless a man gives himself entirely to the Cross, in a spirit of humility and self-abasement; unless he casts himself down to be trampled underfoot by all and despised, accepting injustice, contempt and mockery; unless he undergoes all these things with joy for the sake of the Lord, not claiming any kind of human reward whatsoever - glory or honor or earthly pleasures - he cannot become a true Christian. — Mark The Evangelist

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky. — Muriel Spark

Mockery is childish. It does not become you. — Veronica Roth

The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all. — Michael Palin

This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs. — Ralph Nader

The right of revolution, which tyrants, in mockery, accord to mankind, is no legal right under a government; it is only a natural right to overturn a government. — Lysander Spooner

O that I were a mockery king of snow
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke
To melt myself away in water drops! — William Shakespeare

Nothingever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms. — Charles Dickens

No," he said after a pause, "the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. They do not even withhold their own existence from his sports. Jove may favor Lucianos of Samosata. As long as your mockery is in true godly taste you may mock at the gods and still remain a sound devotee. But in pitying, or condoling with your god, you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms. — Karen Blixen

I think the tone of mockery Heller finds is a part of Mann's irony, but only a part - a brilliant further touch consists in juxtaposing perspectives so that we're led to wonder whether the mockery itself is the last word. — Philip Kitcher

It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed. — Marya Hornbacher

Displeased is too mild a word, Pauline. I would rather use the word "vexed". I would be most discomforted to know that you were "vexed" my lord, Halt said, with just the slightest trace of mockery in his tone. The Baron turned a piercing glare on him, don't take this too far, it warned him. Then we shall make it "extremely vexed", lady Pauline, he said meaningfully. I leave it to you to put it in the right form. He looked from her to Halt. You will receive the official notification of my displeasure tomorrow, Halt. I tremble in anticipation my lord, said Halt. — John Flanagan

First, we must stop issuing drivers' licenses to people in our country illegally. Providing them with forms of government identification makes a mockery of our laws and undermines national security efforts. — Bobby Jindal

While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit. — Lewis Carroll

The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity. — Aldous Huxley

Yes, the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction are equally powerful in this world. The devil will hold his empire over humanity until a limit of time which is still unknown. You laugh? You do not believe in the devil? Scepticism as to the devil is a French idea, and it is also a frivolous idea. Do you know who the devil is? Do you know his name? Although you don't know his name you make a mockery of his form, following the example of Voltaire. You sneer at his hoofs, at his tail, at his horns - all of them the produce of your imagination! In reality the devil is a great and terrible spirit, with neither hoofs, nor tail, nor horns; it is you who have endowed him with these attributes! But ... he is not the question just now! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope. — John F. Kennedy

At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be "about" any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could "make" you do such a thing - who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining.
At first. — Marya Hornbacher

SELF-MOCKERY IS AN UGLIER THING THAN ANY HUMAN FACE, IRIS ... YOU ARE SMART AND YOU ARE KIND. DON'T BETRAY THOSE IMPULSES IN YOURSELF. DON'T BELABOR THE LACK OF PHYSICAL BEAUTY, WHICH IN ANY CASE EVENTUALLY FLEES THOSE WHO HAVE IT AND MAKES THEM SAD. — Gregory Maguire

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake. — Margaret Atwood

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday. — Thornton Wilder

When we played softball, I'd steal second base, feel guilty and go back. — Woody Allen

[It's] long been known that making fun of oneself is only a way of taking oneself seriously slightly less crude than others. 97 — Marcel Benabou

Fear of self is the greatest of all terrors, the deepest of all dread, the commonest of all mistakes. From it grows failure. Because of it, life is a mockery. Out of it comes despair. — David Seabury

There is no free will if to exercise it in certain ways produces punishment. That makes a mockery of free will and renders it counterfeit. — Neale Donald Walsch

In a business that has exploited and ignored our people I have only found dead-ends. We need romantic comedies, gross-out and mockery comedies, horror and thrillers, teen movies and love-stories. All these and more will be a positive step towards the future of Native Americans in the world and film industry; an industry that that offers us not only the chance to play the parts of heroes, love interests and warriors, but also of villains, dorks and dangerous, brokenhearted products of circumstance. — Misty Upham

The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death — Edgar Allan Poe

A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. "Why'd you call that damned nigger woman 'Mrs. Shaw'?" he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy titles for their black neighbors. While it was permissible to call a favored black man "Uncle" or "Professor" - a mixture of affection and mockery - he must never hear the words "mister" or "sir." Black women were "girls" until they were old enough to be called "auntie," but they could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as "Mrs." or "Miss" or "Ma'am." But Major Stem made his own rules. — Timothy B. Tyson

The pain is bad magicians ripping off good ones, doing magic badly, and making a mockery of the art. — Ricky Jay

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible ... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment. — John Ruskin

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was. — Jincy Willett

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.
Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked -- and where are they?
Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery. — W.B.Yeats

Though I understand the theology behind it, the image does not bring me peace; it makes me feel sorry for the lion. It strips him of his essence, the fundamental part of his being. A lion that does not behave as a lion i snot a lion. It isn't even the lion's opposite. It's a mockery of a lion. — Rick Yancey

Love is a gracious host to his guests though to the unbidden his house is a mirage and a mockery. — Khalil Gibran

True religion teaches us to reverence what is under us, to recognize humility and poverty, and, despite mockery and disgrace, wretchedness, suffering, and death, as things divine. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Why did he always have to be the one left behind? Why did he always have to be the one to gather the broken pieces and glue them back together, a mockery of what he'd once been? Why did he always have to suffer through the loss - that gaping, wrenching loss that sucked him up, ripped him apart, and carelessly threw him aside? — Ais

The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics argue that you can twist time and space, that something can appear out of nothing, and that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time. This makes a mockery of our common sense, yet nobody seeks to protect innocent schoolchildren from these scandalous ideas. Why? The theory of relativity makes nobody angry, because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think it is possible to bend space and time, well, be my guest. Go ahead and bend them. What do I care? In contrast, Darwin has deprived us of our souls — Yuval Noah Harari

Ancient eyes had stared at me, filled with ancient grief. And something more. Something so alien and unexpected that I'd almost burst into tears. I'd seen many things in his eyes in the time that I'd known him: lust, amusement, sympathy, mockery, caution, fury. But I had never seen this.
Hope. Jericho Barrons had hope, and I was the reason for it.
I would never forget his smile. It had illuminated him from the inside out. — Karen Marie Moning

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. — George Santayana

See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Many will tell you with mockery and ridicule that the abolition of war can only be a dream ... But we must go on or we will all go under. And the great criticism that can be made is that the world lacks a plan that will enable us to go on ... We must have sufficient imagination and courage to translate the universal wish for peace - which is rapidly becoming a universal necessity - into actuality. — Douglas MacArthur

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The sage of Nazareth may satisfy those who have never faced the problem of evil in their own lives; but to talk about an ideal to those who are under the thralldom of sin is a cruel mockery. Yet if Jesus was merely a man like the rest of men, then an ideal is all that we have in Him. Far more is needed by a sinful world. It is small comfort to be told that there was goodness in the world, when what we need is goodness triumphant over sin. But goodness triumphant over sin involves an entrance of the creative power of God, and that creative power of God is manifested by the miracles. Without the miracles, the New Testament might be easier to believe. But the thing that would be believed would be entirely different from that which presents itself to us now. Without the miracles we should have a teacher; with the miracles we have a Savior. — J. Gresham Machen

For me, getting on a knee and praying is a very special deal for me. A very special moment. For me, it was honoring that and not letting people go out there and make a mockery of it and do a lot of different things and just kind of keeping it safe. — Tim Tebow

Even the most sacred things are not to be honored before the Devil has had his say against them. But since the evil advocate is always able to think of further objections, absolute certainty can never be achieved. He is also allowed to go to extremes, to make use of polemics, mockery or slander. A sentimental plea for tolerance and decorum is merely an attempt to protect one's own cowardice. — Wolfgang Sofsky

Over our heads, two millimetres, maybe one millimetre from our temples, those long tempting lines of steel that bullets make when they're out to kill you were whistling through the hot summer air.
I'd never felt so useless as I did amid all those bullets in the sunlight. A vast and universal mockery. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love. — Helen Garner

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. — Theodor W. Adorno

Generally, writers descend from a lesser tribe, and whatever claim to beauty we have shows up on the printed page far more often than it does in our mirrors. Even as I writer these words I think of dozens off writers, both male and female, who make a mockery of this generalization. But comeliness among writers is rare enough to be noteworthy. — Pat Conroy

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do. — Hermann Hesse

Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery;
that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth.
I repaid vileness with doves. — Pablo Neruda