Sideshow Quotes & Sayings

Championing liberty begins at the local level. There is nothing more fundamental than the principle that a man's home is his castle. Donald Trump's career-long willingness to trample this right tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea party sideshow. — Michelle Malkin

If the euro zone doesn't come up with a comprehensive vision of its own future, you'll have a whole range of nationalist, xenophobic and extreme movements increasing across the European Union. And, frankly, questions about the British debate on EU membership will just be a small sideshow compared to the rise of political populism. — Nick Clegg

Now the freaks are on television, the freaks are in the movies. And it's no longer the sideshow, it's the whole show. The colorful circus and the clowns and the elephants, for all intents and purposes, are gone, and we're dealing only with the freaks. — Jonathan Winters

When being distracted by a sideshow, one should wonder what is happening in the big tent. — Deon Potgieter

A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages has sent poets, popes, kings and fools to the junk heap. — Jim Tully

Then, Valentine's Day came. There was a dance, and balloons and flowers and cheaply made rings and all sorts of lame teddy bears and stuffed animals, as if teenagers can be wooed with the same shit as five-year-olds. It was the Dietzes' most hated holiday of the year, too, because it dealt with the consumerization of something sacred. Mom and Dad had agreed never to buy each other anything on the day. It was a false, Hallmark holiday. A sham. A moneymaking sideshow for insecure couples who didn't have true love. I agreed with this, for the most part. — A.S. King

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself. — Emile M. Cioran

But just as much as it was a sport, it was a sideshow - a carny act that eventually made it to Broadway. So the next time you hear somebody say, "You know wrestling is fake, right?" you can tell him that yes, you know. That's exactly the point. — David Shoemaker

Ideas aren't a sideshow that make our factory a little more valuable. Our factory is a sideshow that makes our ideas a little more valuable! — Seth Godin

You're so charming you make us forget that you have to be a serial killer on the inside to do what you do to us. Put us in your plays, warts and all, showing us off like we're some sort of sideshow freaks. — Lauren Groff

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by - whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans - all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires - show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there - ' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep? — Thomas Ligotti

The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest. — Martin Rees

For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored. — Charles Duhigg

We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event. — Terence McKenna

had been like wandering into the wrong carnival sideshow, the kind that left one feeling sick and slightly soiled. — John Connolly

I also visited several healing meetings ... and became angry with what appeared to be the manipulation of people for the material gains of the faith healer ... Dressing like sideshow barkers. Pushing people over and calling it the power of God. And money - they were always asking for more, leading people to believe that if they gave they would be healed ... - John Wimber — John Wimber

I looked after that Dudley family for too long, over six years. His daddy would take him to the garage and whip him with a rubber hose-pipe trying to beat the girl out a that boy until I couldn't stand it no more ... I wish to God I'd told John Green Dudley he ain't going to hell. That he ain't no sideshow freak cause he like boys. I wish to God I'd filled his ears with good things like I'm trying to do with Mae Mobley. Instead, I just sat in the kitchen, waiting to put the salve on them hose-pipe welts. — Kathryn Stockett

There is only one of me and so many of the people who are not like me, and maybe I'm just an amusing distraction for those other people, Maybe I'm just a freak. A sideshow. — Matthew Quick

I'm the first to admit that I don't write right. Now, relax and enjoy the show! The sideshow, that is. — Lori R. Lopez

Everyone has their secrets, and there are shadows following us all. — Chrystal Vaughan

Lucifer's last words in heaven may have been "Non serviam," but none has served the Almighty so dutifully, since His sideshow in the clouds would never draw any customers if it were not for the main attraction of the devil's hell on earth. — Thomas Ligotti

Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics. — Robert A. Heinlein

most accounts of the war, Missouri tends to wink out of existence after the first year, or makes periodic cameos as a sideshow of guerrilla warfare in which the brutality takes center stage rather than the military role of those brutalities within the wider conflict. — Mark A. Lause

The Western world doesn't really give enough credit to the importance in history of the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. For us it was a sideshow of the Cold War. For the Islamic world it was an unprovoked infidel invasion of a Muslim country not unlike Iraq. — Michael Scheuer

Nineteen fourteen was just flags and new-smelling leather on uniforms. It wasn't until a year later that life started to feel different - started to feel as if maybe this wasn't a sideshow after all - when, instead of getting back their precious, strapping husbands and sons, the women began to get telegrams. These bits of paper which could fall from stunned hands and blow about in the knife-sharp wind, which told you that the boy you'd suckled, bathed, scolded and cried over, was - well - wasn't. Partageuse joined the world late and in a painful labor. — M.L. Stedman

And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old bench on the verge of collapse. Even now the Showman stands before my eyes. His stiff red hair moves a little toward one shoulder, as if he is going to turn his gaze upon me, and moves back again; then his head moves a little toward the other shoulder in this never-ending game of horrible peek-a-boo. I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate. — Thomas Ligotti

I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow. — Sylvia Plath

Cue the cruel and mocking laughter from the puppet master of this fucked up sideshow. — A. Zavarelli

It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the moist swampland. One of those things in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved arm in a laboratory vat. — Ray Bradbury

I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year. each year I thought that at least one class act would force its way into a booth or sideshow, but I was always mistaken. The lure of the fair was the perfect harmony of its joyous decadence, its burned-out dishonored vulgarity, its riot of colors and smells, its jangling, tawdry music, and its wicked glimpse into the outlaw life of hucksters, tattoo parlors, monstrous freaks, and strippers. — Pat Conroy

Peter! Were you looking for a horse-shoe?"
"No; I was expecting the horse, but the shoe is a piece of pure, gorgeous luck."
"And observation. I found it."
"You did. And I could kiss you for it. You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event
one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted li-chee. It will not be an unimportant sideshow attached to a detective investigation. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It's a circus out there, mama
and your baby's got the sideshow blues. — Todd Snider

Emotional intelligence is what humans are good at and that's not a sideshow. That's the cutting edge of human intelligence. — Ray Kurzweil

Were uproariously demanding relief from their intolerable miseries - in this Potemkin sideshow there prevailed a preposterous and mendacious comfort. — Stefan Zweig

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow. — Arthur Rimbaud

It's amazing that the city we live in allows "pets" that belong in a sideshow, but makes it illegal for me to have a switchblade. — Helen Ellis

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow. — Jonathan Lethem

What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities. — Hunter S. Thompson

Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species. — Hendrik Poinar

When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing. — Christina Hendricks

An "exorcism" carried out by these untrained individuals very often becomes a source of misinformation, unecessary pain, a sideshow circus atmosphere. Not to mention the very serious dangers inherent in the actions of such dubious individuals for the victims body and soul. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that we are able to recognize and find a legitimate exorcist. The first step should always be to ask your parish priest for direction. And as a rule NEVER pay money for such ministry. — Jack Ashcraft

Television is god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business. — Paddy Chayefsky

Sex is a sideshow in the world of the animal, for the dominant color of that world is fear. — Robert Ardrey

When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket. — Brenda Laurel

Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation. — Chris Abani

God help us! We have turned the holy fire of God into a circus sideshow - and naive Christians are buying this without realizing that such shenanigans are actually blasphemous.21 — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Every day I saw others like me in this city - enough of us to populate our own town. But we only acknowledged each other with a furtive glance, fearful of calling attention to ourselves. Being alone in public was painful enough; two could find themselves smack in the center of an unbearable sideshow. We didn't seem to have any of our own places to gather in community, to immerse ourselves in our own ways and our own languages. — Leslie Feinberg

But if you're coming off ACL surgery, you don't need to be having a press conference at OTAs. Every week? Really? It becomes a circus, a sideshow. It takes away from the focus of what those sessions are supposed to be about: the team. — Donovan McNabb