A Quote by John Updike

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

John Updike

Quote Topics

All Things Creation Cruel Emperor Things Thrive Truly

Quote Author

John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

Frank Herbert

Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.

Frank Herbert

We are slaves in the hands of nature - slaves to a bit of bread, slaves to praise, slaves to blame, slaves to wife, to husband, to child, slaves to everything.

Swami Vivekananda

The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.

Chinua Achebe

Bullfights are a very cultural thing. I know many people think it's cruel, but so many things are cruel. Hunting, the electric chair, wars. These are all cruel things as well.

Fernando Botero

The emperor is naked!" The parade stopped. The emperor paused. A hush fell over the crowd, until one quick-thinking peasant shouted: "No, he isn't. The emperor is merely endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle!

James Finn Garner

In our own times, you see, an emperor came to the city of Rome, where there's the temple of an emperor, where there's a fisherman's tomb. And so that pious and Christian emperor, wishing to beg for health, for salvation from the Lord, did not proceed to the temple of a proud emperor, but to the tomb of a fisherman, where he could imitate that fisherman in humility, so that he, being thus approached, might then obtain something from the Lord, which a haughty emperor would be quite unable to earn.

Saint Augustine

We bear witness to the worst of human brutality, retweet what we have witnessed, and then we move on to the next atrocity. There is always more atrocity.

Roxane Gay

Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.

Margaret Mead

I worship nothing. Not a good lie nor a dark one. If nature is proof of God's amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.

Gary Numan

Now I had lived long enough and had heard enough from urchins my age and from other slaves, to distrust the person who calls himself merciful, or just, or kindly. Usually these are the most cruel, niggardly and selfish people, and slaves learn to fear the master who prefaces his remarks with tributes to his own virtues.

Elizabeth Borton de Trevino

People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'

Natasha Trethewey

It's wonderful to move forward technologically, but we cannot forget that we are human beings who thrive on relationships, who thrive on interconnectivity, who thrive on sharing your feelings and emotions.

Goldie Hawn

All fundamentalist theologians make the ordinances of creation an essential part of creation and absolutize them. Women belong at home, fulfil their life through motherhood, by caring for their husbands and serving them. The fixed role pattern of one particular economic and family order is transformed into an order willed by God and given by creation. With a methodologically similar logic, slaves were understood as those elected by God to serve the whites.

Dorothee Solle

The supreme nobility of a Roman emperor does not consist in being a master of slaves, but in being a lord of free men, who loves freedom even in those who serve him.