Top 52 Abysmal Quotes & Sayings

Republicans and others who are in anguish over the possibility of socialized medicine ought to have to explain their ideology to a mother with a sick newborn. They ought to have to explain how this nation can debate health care and not mention how abysmal ours is.

Pet ownership is an absolutely abysmal situation brought about by human manipulation.

The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.

I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?

I recommend Batman especially, for he tends to transcend the abysmal society in which he's found himself. His morality is rather rigid, also. I rather respect Batman.

We all know there are problems with Obamacare, and Washington's implementation of it has been abysmal. But rejecting Medicaid won't fix any of those things.

The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.

I spent a lot of time behind the Iron Curtain, and their cars were abysmal.

Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.

Hope knows no fear. Hope dares to blossom even inside the abysmal abyss. Hope secretly feeds and strengthens promise.

President [Barack] Obama's pick of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education was abysmal.

... statism systematically violates the rights of individuals and is, therefore, immoral. Because it suppresses the mind and violates men's rights, it thereby causes abysmal poverty and is utterly impractical.

What's an easier way to say 'bad?' Let's go with 'abysmal.'

Definitely it would be foolish to try and make my Czech films here in America, as foolish as it is when some Czech filmmakers try to make movies of America in Czechoslovakia. It was always abysmal stuff.

War and sex are what I call the two abysmal - by that I mean deep - parts of the human condition.

Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.

I could never be lonely without a husband, but without my trinkets, my golden gods, I could find abysmal gloom.

The stream of empty platitudes ordering troop worship is especially ironic considering the abysmal treatment veterans receive once they return home.

Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know.

The most abysmal advise ever given by the ignorant to the stupid.

I, myself, sank into that abysmal pit of feeling utterly worthless, useless and burdensome. Caring for an animal, especially one that's been rescued, can help return people to a sense of being needed and useful.

Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?

Does the human heart know chasms so abysmal?

I know the most important faculty to develop is one for hard, continuous and varied work and living; but the difference between knowing this and doing anything consistent about it is often abysmal.

Love, which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb. Love, which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom. Love, which is lust, is the Main of Desire. Love, which is lust, is the Centric Fire. So man and woman will keep their trust, Till the very Springs of the Sea run dust. Yea, each with the other will lose and win, Till the very Sides of the Grave fall in. For the strife of Love's the abysmal strife, And the word of Love is the Word of Life. And they that go with the Word unsaid, Though they seem of the living, are damned and dead.

The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you.

Ohio has long been an embarrassment to charter-school supporters nationwide, with its trail of scandal and graft and abysmal student performance.

I worked in a comic shop for five years, and the amount of titles I could excitedly recommend to teenage girls was pretty abysmal for awhile.

Let me just say that while I personally am very fond of John Boehner, his record of predicting what would happen if certain policies, economic policies were instituted is abysmal, okay?

Presidents Truman and Nixon left office under dark clouds of scandal and with abysmal levels of support, but with the passage of time, both have been reassessed far more positively.

I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.

Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?

Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent - the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.

Having been kept pretty strict in prep schools, I guess I couldn't cope with all the freedom at Yale. I had a wild, wonderful time, got abysmal grades and was bounced out in my freshman year. I then came back the following fall as a repeating freshman, lasted until April and got bounced out again - for the same reason.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

The distance separating the statute and constitutionality is so abysmal that negotiations are impossible.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

I have often noticed that the need for cash and the production of a masterpiece just don't coincide with me. Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don't think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

On reflection, I think the 1980s were a dreadful, abysmal time.

Fine arts education in public schools is really abysmal. The same emphasis should be put on music, theater, dance - anything creative - that's put on math and science.

The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathomed center.

Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable

The Trouble with liberals is twofold: They have a horrible blind spot with respect to moral principles and they have an abysmal understanding of economic principles.

A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads.

The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.

There are some actors who are very good at developing things, who have... 'things in the pipeline.' I am abysmal at that kind of thing, loathe it, and am a terrible planner. Unless I'm showing up on the set and acting, I prefer to have nothing to do with the actual business of being an actor.

Most magazines have become wallpaper, they're all the same, all the same celebrities. It's really an abysmal time in American journalism right now. But occasionally one story or two will pop out.

A dogmatic tone is generally inspired by abysmal ignorance. The man who knows nothing thinks he is informing others of something which he has that moment learnt; the man who knows a great deal can scarcely believe that people are ignorant of what he is telling them, and speaks more diffidently.

It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility.

Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf...There are two life forces in the world Jewish and Gentile...I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable...The difference between us is abysmal...You might say: 'Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.' But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different; they are opposed in mortal enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal.