egregious QUOTES

1 " Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for centuries. "

― Darrel Ray , Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality

2 " Compassion without discipline is egregious self-sabotage. "

― Stefan Molyneux

3 " I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we—and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians—have imagined. "

― , Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past

4 " There is no position so critical, no office so important, that the occasional, and even the more than occasional, utter incompetent will not wind up filling it. Heart surgeons, popes, presidents, it makes no difference. Look around and you will see an existence replete with people who are betraying, in a most egregious manner, the powers and responsibilities that have been entrusted to them. "

― Daniel Polansky , A City Dreaming

5 " Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view. "

― Arundhati Roy , The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

6 " Even the most egregious captive state, bound and gagged on her damp bunk, felt eerily familiar to her. With nothing to do but lie there and think of things, she reflected that captivity took many different forms. A woman under the domination of her father or husband was as much a prisoner as a hostage on a boat. She had merely traded one form of servitude for another. "

― Susan Wiggs , The Hostage (Great Chicago Fire Trilogy #1)

7 " Nothing is more egregious than greedy politicians. "

― Sonia Rumzi

8 " No one wants their stuff stolen. No one wants their physical person harmed. If you understand the implications of those two truths, you can come to see the egregious moral and practical problems of a state-managed society. "

― Jeffrey Tucker

9 " The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame. "

― Christopher Hitchens , The Trial of Henry Kissinger

10 " But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be " memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The " independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to " side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes. "

11 " Whatever crimes this man had committed, they weren't as egregious as his inflated self-image. "

― Katherine McIntyre , Stolen Petals (Take to the Skies #1.5)

12 " We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.
- A Fog in Santone (1898-1901) "

― O. Henry , Hikayeler

13 " National Review's premise was that conformity was especially egregious among the intellectuals, that herd of independent minds. "

― George F. Will , One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation

14 " Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house. " What an egregious insult to good taste. "

15 " There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. "