Derision Quotes

“A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony--and laughter, which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been the only intelligible language of madness and misery. Ecstasy only smiles--despair laughs.”
― Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

“Where there is no derision the people perish," said Chiffan.

"Now who said that?" asked Steenhold, always anxious to check his quotations. "It sounds familiar."

"I said it," said Chiffan. "Get on with your suggestions.”
― H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror

“It is [Simon] Wessely’s often-unconcealed “derision” directed towards people with ME -- a disease from which people die and which appears on Coroners’ death certificates as the cause of death -- which arouses such anger, an anger that is not confined to patients in the UK but encompasses medical scientists in other countries whose decision-makers have come under Wessely’s thrall.”
― Michael Hanlon

“There never was a throne yet built so high that it could not be rocked by laughter from below.”
― Gordon R. Dickson, Soldier, Ask Not

“Some things are made funny to some people by their ignorance.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Lilac makes on occasion a sound between a sniff and a snort that's as damning as all improper words in the language and, like them, can't be written down.”
― Leslie Ford, The Devil's Stronghold

“Deacon began to speak of a woman who he had used; how he had turned up his nose at her because her loose and easy ways gave him the license to drop and despise her. That while the adultery preyed on him for a short while (very short), his long remorse was at having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different.”
― Toni Morrison, Paradise

“The better print journalists allow us to consider the meaning, for ourselves and our country, of what might otherwise seem to be isolated bits of information. But while anyone can repost an article, researching and writing is hard work that requires time and money. Before you deride the "mainstream media," note that it is no longer the mainstream. It is derision that is the mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The only effective art of our time is the satirical, the harsh and witty, the ironic and derisive.”
― Muriel Spark, The Golden Fleece: Essays