Scoundrel Quotes

1. "Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

2. "The wise will hide your follies and help you learn, but the wicked ones will gossip about it with scoundrels."
Author: Aniruddha Sastikar

3. "This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of thebourgeoisie.In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs."
Author: Antonin Artaud

4. "I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler." My friend smiled. "Holmes, the busybody!" His smile broadened. "Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!" Holmes chuckled heartily."
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

5. "No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots."
Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

6. "A gentleman can't let a lady sleep in an armchair while he takes his ease in a bed.""But you are not a gentleman," she pointed out. "You are the greatest scoundrel in all the land."He tilted his head to consider that. "All right. You take the chair."
Author: Christina Brooke

7. "I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy."
Author: David Grossman

8. "You have my word as a gentleman." [The other man remarks that he is not a gentleman and he retorts] "Then you have my word as a scoundrel, which, I know, opens up a rather confusing paradox that I have neither the time nor inclination to disentangle."
Author: David Liss

9. "It is at the family fireside, often under the shelter of the law itself, that the real tragedies of life are acted; in these days traitors wear gloves, scoundrels cloak themselves in public esteem, and their victims die broken-hearted, but smiling to the last. What I have just related to you is almost an every-day occurrence; and yet you profess astonishment."
Author: Émile Gaboriau

10. "Look at them running to and fro about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at heart and, worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11. "Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

12. "Man get used to everything; a scoundrel!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

13. "What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14. "Where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet - and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him - and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity - it would be better to live so than die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how - only to live! ...How true! Lord, how true! Man is a scoundrel! And he's a scoundrel who calls him a scoundrel for that."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

15. "I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

16. "In revolutions authority remains with the greatest scoundrels."
Author: Georges Jacques Danton

17. "Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons."
Author: H.L. Mencken

18. "Ye are a scoundrel, a black-hearted robber and a rogue,' Stubble said cheerily to the grumbling captain. It was his usual way of haggling, and he'd beaten down the riverman to a decent price for conveying himself and Anvar to Lankarn."
Author: Ian Livingstone

19. "You are a set of deceitful scoundrels! But bless you! I give in. I will take Gildor's advice. If the danger were not so dark, I should dance for joy. Even so, I cannot help feeling happy; happier than I have felt for a long time."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

20. "Sure, politicians rob from us, the people—but only because it's in our best interest. If they didn't rob from us, somebody else would, and this other scoundrel wouldn't even bother to wrap the theft in an American flag. So really we should rejoice in being swindled, and group together as patriots, and sing national anthems, and smile because we're being looted by men and women who know the best thing for us is to have us believe they are the best thing for us—and that they are the best among us, and as such they deserve special privileges that we, the huddling masses, have no right to demand."
Author: Jarod Kintz

21. "His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

22. "Dandy?" Sam was full-on scowling now. "What the hell does that scoundrel want?"Finley returned his dark expression with one of her own. "You shouldn't use words you can't spell, mutton head."
Author: Kady Cross

23. "Within the hour, Abraham Ravenwood was denounced as the Devil, a cheat, a scoundrel, a no-goodnik, and a thief."
Author: Kami Garcia

24. "A gentleman would have announced himself!" I told him, pressing against the side of the tub. "And a scoundrel would have joined you."-- Kit Marlowe to the witch Gillian (shortly before joining her in the tub!)"
Author: Karen Chance

25. "I think,' Olympia said slowly, 'that I know you quite well.' She looked down at the deck and added in a carefully mild voice, 'You can be a scoundrel; I know that. You stole from me and betrayed me and lied to me. You have no morals and no ideals; you think of yourself first and you're a coward sometimes on that account.' She hesitated, chewing her lip. 'What people call a coward, anyway. I don't know what cowardice is anymore. I don't know what heroism is.' She looked up. 'But I know one thing, and I learned it from you. I know what courage means. It means to pick up and go on, no matter what. It means having a heart of iron, like they say. You have that."
Author: Laura Kinsale

26. "For years I'd been awaiting that overriding urge I'd always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There's a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: "I'm pregnant." I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother's deepest fear.) (27)"
Author: Lionel Shriver

27. "Forgive me....I called you an idiot. I spoke too hastily. You are not. Had I given it more thought, I would have called you a scoundrel."
Author: Lloyd Alexander

28. "Like a battalion of marines at roll call, her neck hairs marshaled to five-alarm status. She stumbled back to her desk, jerked open the botton drawer, retrieved a pair of Nighthawk binoculars, fixed the scopes on him, and fiddled with the focus. Gotcha. Hair the colour of coal. Chocolate brown eyes. A five-o'clock shadow ringing his craggy jawline. Handsome as the day was long...He sauntered towards her, oozing charisma from every pore. Charlee forgot to breathe. And then he committed the gravest sin of all, knocking her world helter-skelter. The scoundrel smiled."
Author: Lori Wilde

29. "Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled."
Author: Michael Crichton

30. "Then he hung up, the scoundrel!"
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

31. "My humble...I don't drink...''A shame! What about a game of dice, then? Or do have some other favourite game? Dominoes? Cards?'I don't play games,' the already weary barman responded.'Altogether bad,' the host concluded. 'As you will, but there's something noce nice hidden in men who avoid wine, games, the society of charming women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate everybody around them. True, there may be exceptions. Among persons sitting down with me at the banqueting table, there have been on occasion some extraordinary scoundrels! Chapter 18"
Author: Mikhail Bulgakov

32. "No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting."
Author: Murray Kempton

33. "Religion is all-too-often a refuge for scoundrels."
Author: Neal Boortz

34. "Is this where you tell me that I'm a scoundrel, and I say that I think you like me because I'm a scoundrel? Because we've already covered this, I'm the Han Solo."
Author: Rainbow Rowell

35. "The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence."
Author: Remy De Gourmont

36. "If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

37. "Miss Kinsley regarded him with the look of disgust girls reserved for snails and frogs. "Any man who would suggest to a young woman that she should elope rather than listen to her papa's advice can only be up to no good.""Elope?" Oliver queried, his eyes narrowing on Miss Kinsley. "This scoundrel proposed marriage to you?""Now, Miss Kinsley," Nathan began in his best placating voice, "we both know it wasn't like-""Quiet!" Oliver snapped at him. "Or I swear not even Maria will keep me from throttling you."Nathan swallowed. Hard."
Author: Sabrina Jeffries

38. "Good lack-a-daisy, Clara!" her aunt reproached her. "The man might dress improperly, but he'sbehaving like a perfect gentleman otherwise. And being wonderfully kind to the lassies, too. Why do youinsist on being rude to him?""Yes, mademoiselle," Morgan teased, "do explain yourself." Settling back against the carriage, hecrossed his brawny arms over his chest. The muscles strained against the flimsy cambric shirt, making hermouth go dry. Why must a scoundrel fit only for hell possess a body fit for heaven?"
Author: Sabrina Jeffries

39. "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
Author: Samuel Johnson

40. "You are a cad,' he told himself. 'A cur. A bounder. A scoundrel. A ... human thesaurus."
Author: Sarah M. Eden

41. "No scoundrel is so stupid as to not find a reason for his vile conduct."
Author: Shakti Gawain

42. "Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there's a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you're writing your poem, there's one less scoundrel in the world. And I'd like a world, wouldn't you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I'm certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don't think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay."
Author: Ted Kooser

43. "It is considered in the Sto Plains that only scoundrels know the second verse of their national anthem, since anyone spending time memorizing that would be up to no good purpose."
Author: Terry Pratchett

44. "Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world."
Author: Thomas Carlyle

45. "I'd never painted anything before. I was quite content to take other people's work since I didn't care anyway about the subject matter. I approached subject matter as a scoundrel. I had nothing to say about it whatsoever. I only wanted to make these exciting paintings."
Author: Tom Wesselmann

46. "What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?"
Author: W. Clement Stone

47. "One or two of these scoundrel statesmen should be shot once a-year, just to keep the others on their good behavior."
Author: Walter Scott

48. "Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr. Honesty lives in at the end of HIS career?"
Author: Wilkie Collins

49. "As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation."
Author: William Faulkner

50. "If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, "Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go!" -- do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, "With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel."
Author: Yann Martel

Scoundrel Quotes Pictures