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1 " no one can recover if they won’t admit the wrongdoings. i won’t recover if i pretend it was all sunshine. i have to remember his vindictive temper and realize that sheltering the house from the storm wasn’t actually going to make a difference if i still got damaged in the process. because then it’s just another broken house with no one to tell its story. "
― Taylor Rhodes , calloused: a field journal
2 " Foreigners are mystified by the whole business while thoughtful Americans – there are several of us – are equally mystified that the ruling establishment of the country has proved to be so mindlessly vindictive that it is willing, to be blunt, to overthrow the lawful government of the United States – that is, a president elected in 1992 and reelected in 1995 by We the People, that sole source of all political legitimacy, which takes precedence over the Constitution and the common law and God himself. "
― Gore Vidal , The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000
3 " Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow. "
― Jonathan Galassi , Muse
4 " Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets, the wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings. "
― Winston S. Churchill
5 " Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths allBolted against me.Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentenceWorse than Abiram's.Him the vindictive rod of angry JusticeSent quick and howling to the centre headlong;I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, amBuried above ground. "
― William Cowper , The Poetical Works Of William Cowper
6 " Atheism rises above creeds and puts Humanity upon one plane.There can be no 'chosen people' in the Atheist philosophy.There are no bended knees in Atheism;No supplications, no prayers;No sacrificial redemptions;No 'divine' revelations;No washing in the blood of the lamb;No crusades, no massacres, no holy wars;No heaven, no hell, no purgatory;No silly rewards and no vindictive punishments;No christs, and no saviors;No devils, no ghosts and no gods. "
― , Atheism And Other Addresses
7 " As the books of Job, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk clearly show, God has a high threshold of tolerance for what appropriate to say in a prayer. God can " handle" my unsuppressed rage. I may well find that my vindictive feelings need God's correction - but only by taking those feelings to God will I have the opportunity for correction and healing. "
8 " You want to see compassion? Fine." I take the hand pressed against my shoulders and kiss his knuckles. " I've now kissed the hand of my mother's killer." Before he has time to react to my chaste kiss, I bring my other hand up and slap him. His head whips to the side." I'm also a vindictive bitch," I say. "
9 " I've also represented people who have committed terrible crimes but nonetheless struggle to recover and to find redemption. I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity - seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions.Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. My work with the poor and incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I've come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's never to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and - perhaps - we all need some measure of unmerited grace. "
― Bryan Stevenson
10 " The careless, the lukewarm Catholics should, above all, dread hell, for he is continually walking on the brink of the infernal abyss. He makes little of the precepts of hearing Mass, of the prescribed abstinence from flesh meat, he scruples not neglecting the religious training of his children, he associates with persons and frequents places that are to him an occasion of sin, he yields to impure thoughts, commits sins of impurity without remorse, gives way to his vindictive feelings against his neighbor, indulges in excess in eating and drinking, neglects prayer and the sacraments. Now is the time for him to be aroused from his life of sin, now is the time for him to give up sin and change his life, for if he defers doing so, it may soon be to late. This may, indeed, be the last warning that God gives him. "
11 " There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus. "
― Neal Stephenson , Cryptonomicon
12 " I do not believe that I am a vindictive man, but when the immortal gods take a hand in the matter it is pardonable to observe the results with complacency. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , Collected Short Stories: Volume 1
13 " Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad. "
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
14 " We like to think of individuals as unique. Yet if this is true of everyone, then we all share the same quality, namely our uniqueness. What we have in common is the fact that we are all uncommon. Everybody is special, which means that nobody is. The truth, however, is that human beings are uncommon only up to a point. There are no qualities that are peculiar to one person alone. Regrettably, there could not be a world in which only one individual was irascible, vindictive or lethally aggressive. This is because human beings are not fundamentally all that different from each other, a truth postmodernists are reluctant to concede. We share an enormous amount in common simply by virtue of being human, and this is revealed by the vocabularies we have for discussing human character. We even share the social processes by which we come to individuate ourselves. "
― Terry Eagleton , How to Read Literature
15 " I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance. "
― James Thurber
16 " LARRY--(with increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey) I'm afraid to live, am I?--and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won't see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it's only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! (He laughs with a sneering, vindictive self-loathing, staring inward at himself with contempt and hatred. Then abruptly he makes Hickey again the antagonist.) You think you'll make me admit that to myself? "
― Eugene O'Neill , The Iceman Cometh
17 " Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's " curses" are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children. "
18 " The most important thing is the indigenous people are not vindictive by nature. We are not here to oppress anybody - but to join together and build Bolivia, with justice and equality. "
19 " There's a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out of their way to hurt others, will end up broke and alone. "