A Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Vladimir Nabokov

Quote Topics

Crime Cruelty Music Oppression Simple Soft Stupidity

Quote Author

Vladimir Nabokov
American - Novelist
April 22, 1899 - July 2, 1977

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Vladimir Nabokov

Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.

Walter Savage Landor

Music comes from the heart and returns to the heart... music is spontaneous, impulsive expression... its range is without limit... music is forever growing... music can be one element to help us build a new conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man.

Leopold Stokowski

Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.

Robert A. Heinlein

Nothing shocks our moral feelings so deeply as cruelty does. We can forgive every other crime, but not cruelty. The reason for this is that it is the very opposite of compassion.

Arthur Schopenhauer

If we have a simple existence, we shall feel how happy and how fortunate we are. There are some people who are of the opinion that simplicity is almost tantamount to stupidity. But simplicity and stupidity are like the North Pole and the South Pole. One can be as simple as a child and, at the same time, one can have boundless knowledge, light and wisdom.

Sri Chinmoy

Given the devastation that crime can visit on families and communities, I will err on being a little too tough on crime than being too soft on crime.

Tom Cotton

We are opposed to all cruelty, so as advocates of non-violence, opponents of oppression, people who abhor the cruelty inherent in slaughtering we say the only ethical way to consume flesh is to pick up the carcass of an animal who has died naturally or been killed accidentally, say by being hit by a car, and eat that.

Ingrid Newkirk

In fact, we will have to give up taking things for granted, even the apparently simple things. We have to learn to understand nature and not merely to observe it and endure what it imposes on us. Stupidity, from being an amiable individual defect, has become a social crime.

John Desmond Bernal

No politician after the Nixon-Agnew years would say, 'I was against the death penalty,' because they replaced 'soft on communism' with 'soft on crime.' You just see the horror of this thing.

Mike Farrell

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.

Anna Sewell

When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.

Edith Sitwell

Stupidity is not a crime.

Alexei Navalny

I am a simple vessel with complex overtones, opinionated on occasions but willing to listen. Comfortable with reclusiveness and devoted to privacy and family. Patriotic to a fault and allergic to cruelty, ignorance and bad music.