Quotes & Sayings About Sleaze

Bangkok is one of the world's great cities, all of which own red-light districts that find their ways into the pages of novels from time to time. The sex industry in Thailand is smaller per capita because the Thais are less coy about it than many other people. Most visitors to the kingdom enjoy wonderful vacations without coming across any evidence of sleaze at all — John Burdett

Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated (by the American media expert Ben Bagditrian) that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies! — Carl Sagan

It's worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature's loss as the republic's gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of. — Sarah Vowell

The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture's sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark. — Dean Koontz

In 'Blade Runner,' the here is quite enough: a vision of dark, cramped, urban squalor. This is Los Angeles in the year 2019, when most of the earth's inhabitants have colonized other planets, and only a polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam, and perpetual rain. — Richard Corliss

Unless you're really interested in sleaze, you should not buy 'Newsweek.' — Liz Trotta

We pay people and reward them for greed and sleaze . When a sex tape gets made a star is born with a publicity agent on speed dial a six figure pay cheque and a tacky lingerie line ... selling filth so you can get your face on Time magazine ... From Jukebox — Saira Viola

Davy,
Didn't you realize that the only thing I wanted from Mark was his version of the night you,
well, removed him from the party? I know Mark is a sleaze. I'm not involved with him in any
way, but when you vanished from in front of me, what was I to think?
I don't know if you're even human. For all I knew you fly around in a flying saucer kidnapping
humans left and right. If this sort of jumping to conclusions bothers you, think how much
alternative explanation you offered.
I know you're hurt, and I guess you were hurt even more when you thought I was getting
involved with Mark again. But, dammit, you are doing your share of lashing out, yourself.
Millie
P.S. I still don't know if you are human, but I know that I care for you enough that you can
hurt me. You did. — Steven Gould

Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free, all spark, soul, variety, sleaze, spontaneity and fun go right out the window — Cintra Wilson

There is always sleaze in the news. And you know what? The news is always a combination of things that are interesting and things that are important. — Jeffrey Toobin

Nothing in life was ever clearly drawn, obviously just, or totally emotionally satisfying, but the moment-to-moment stuff of reality featured infinitely more complication, sleaze, struggle, true beauty, unfairness, profundity, passion, and depth of consciousness than she, in her frantic struggle to be somebody other than her unspectacular self, had been previously aware of. page 302 — Cintra Wilson

To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze. — P. J. O'Rourke

I love LA! The freeways, the cars, the smog, the glitter, the glitz, the sleaze, the prostitutes, the poison that falls from the sky. — Donald O'Donovan

The newspaper got it all wrong. They should have called me a harlot and a slut, a poseur and a tease, a nubile and naive,
a slattern and a sleaze, a vandalist and anarchist, a dirty dilettante with a fatal and fervent disease.
Because I was all of those things in the twelve days when there was too much rain and I was burning and I found and lost Justine. — Rebecca Godfrey

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. — Lester Bangs

After all, that's all a man really needs: a big city full of sin and sleaze, and a chance. — Mark Lawrence

People always go on about sleaze, but I think it's only a small part of what I write about. — Marc Almond

Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze. — Edward Abbey

How about this John Edwards thing? Imagine that, a personal injury attorney who turns out to be a sleaze ball. Who could have seen that coming? — Jay Leno

We live in a world that is filled with filth and sleaze, a world that reeks of evil. You cannot afford that filthy poison to touch you. Stay away from it. Avoid it. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Could you conjugate that? To sleaze. I sleaze. You sleaze. We all have sleazen. — Armistead Maupin

Fellow senators balked at punishing Senator Alfonse D'Amato of New York though he was caught in a series of transactions that earned him the label "Senator Sleaze." D'Amato explained their reluctance as he defended his own behavior. "There but for the grace of God go most of my colleagues," he said. — William Greider

I'm the last of the truly tacky women. I do trash with flash and sleaze with ease. — Bette Midler

Bad as political fiction can be, there is always a politician prepared to make it look artistic by comparison. — Christopher Hitchens

No band on 21st-century radio has mined pre-grunge hair-metal's sleaze like L.A.'s Buckcherry. So it makes poetic sense that they'd spend their sixth album tallying all seven deadly sins. — Chuck Eddy

Sleaze is a point by point refutation of elegance. — Mason Cooley

You couldn't find your dick in the dark, you scheming, sleaze-mongering scumwad. — Nenia Campbell

Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous. — Dick Cavett

Power will be maintained by the groovy guy or gal who gets the most media coverage for his sleaze. Naturally, his friends in various businesses will do okay, too. — Frank Zappa

Closely - you can't have a front without a back, you can't have an up without a down, and I'm not sure you can have light without dark, purity without sleaze, good without evil. — Harlan Coben

He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. — Jonathan Franzen

This is a sleaze bag murdering dog and he [O.J. Simpson] has played us for fools. And the worst thing he did was exacerbate the racial divide in this country. He divided black and white America. — Geraldo Rivera

Again I insist upon the point. The whole of the sexual revolution has been a colossal failure, and has wrought untold human misery. The move for same-sex pseudogamy is inextricable from that revolution; it is grafted upon it and cannot survive or even appear to make sense without it. We cannot have a good nation unless we are a good people. We cannot be a good people when we throw contempt upon manhood and womanhood and the virtue that honors their beauty and their being for one another; it is like asking for clean sleaze, or cold love. — Anthony M. Esolen