A Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Contemptuous people are sure to be contemptible.

Nicolas Chamfort

Quote Topics

Contemptible Contemptuous People Sure

Quote Author

Nicolas Chamfort
French - Writer
April 6, 1741 - April 13, 1794

We're contemptuous of 'distracted' working mothers. We're contemptuous of 'selfish' rich mothers. We're contemptuous of mothers who have no choice but to work, but also of mothers who don't need to work and still fail to fulfill an impossible ideal of selfless motherhood. You don't have to look very hard to see the common denominator.

Kim Brooks

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

W. H. Auden

There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible.

Samuel Johnson

I wasn't sure if I admired him for feeling everything so hard and fiercely, or if I was contemptuous of him for having so much emotion that he had to spill it out every window of the house.

Maggie Stiefvater

People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly and completely contemptible.

George Galloway

Leadership has to be focused on some very radical ideas that only we as 21st Century people can talk about: making sure people have a livelihood, making sure people receive a living wage, making sure the environment, the Mother Earth, is embraced and cherished and not destroyed. Making sure people are healthy in what they eat, making sure we hold people and corporations accountable for the damage they do not only to our environment but to our institutions.

Danny Glover

The court today, just as in 1776, is deaf to the voices of the people and their repeated entreaties: they have become arrogant, contemptuous, highhanded, and literal despots.

George Wallace

What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.

George MacDonald

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are.

Rosellen Brown

Making sure every child can read, making sure that we encourage faith-based organizations ... when it comes to helping neighbors in need, making sure that our neighborhoods are safe, making sure that the state of Texas recognizes that people from all walks of life have got a shot at the Texas dream but, most importantly, making sure that government is not the answer to people's problems.

George W. Bush

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

James Baldwin

Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.

Harriet Martineau

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

Jane Austen

The leader is best, When people are hardly aware of his existence, Not so good when people praise his government, Less good when people stand in fear, Worst, when people are contemptuous. Fail to honor people, and they will fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who speaks little, When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, The people say, 'We did it ourselves.'