Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.
— Herman Melville
Remarkable Preposterous quotations
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous.
He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,--is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
What landed Jesus on the cross was the preposterous idea that common, ordinary, broken, screwed-up people could be godly.
Every day each of us wakes up, reaches into drawers and closets, pulls out a costume for the day and proceeds to dress in a style that can only be called preposterous.
The central ideas of Christianity, an angry God and vicarious atonement, are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present stage of enlightenment, absurd, preposterous, and blasphemous propositions.
Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.
Whatever happens, my audience mustn't know whether I am spoofing or being serious; and likewise I mustn't know either. I am in a constant interrogation; when does the deep and philosophically valid Dali begin, and where does the looney and preposterous Dali end?
To say that a schlemiel is a luckless person is to touch only the negative side.
It is the schlemiel's avocation and profession to miss out on things, to muff opportunities, to be persistently, organically, preposterously and ingeniously out of place. A hungry schlemiel dreams of a plate of hot soup, and hasn't a spoon.
Preposterous ass, that never read so far to know the cause why music was ordain'd! Was it not to refresh the mind of man, after his studies or his usual pain?
I have an adult emotional life and an editing system inside me which prevents me from being preposterously stupid.
It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.
But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved.
To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.
Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.
Advice is priceless: when it becomes interference it is preposterous.
There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder.
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively;
it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories
It seems far-fetched, even preposterous, to blame the global economic order for the persistence of severe poverty in countries that are ruled by obvious thugs and crooks.
The state is an organization of mere mortals who, by one dubious method or another, have been allowed to don the mantle of political legitimacy and to command obedience on pain of imprisonment even of those who never consented to the preposterous arrangement.
We have 3,141 counties in this country.
That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can't assimilate these 8-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.
"You know that it is quite preposterous of you to chase rainbows," said the sane person to the poet. "Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one," mused the poet.
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Appreciate the power of rumor, often malicious, no matter how preposterous, within the local populations you are seeking to help.
February is a suitable month for dying.
Everything around is dead, the trees black and frozen so that the appearance of green shoots two months hence seems preposterous, the ground hard and cold, the snow dirty, the winter hateful, hanging on too long.
It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant.
It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldnt it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.
But, as sculpture and painting are gifts of God, what I insist on is, that both shall be used purely and lawfully, that gifts which the Lord has bestowed upon us, for His glory and our good, shall not be preposterously abused, nay, shall not be perverted to our destruction.
Sleep with Seth Mortensen? Good grief.
It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard. It was appalling. If I absorbed his life force, there was no telling how long it'd be until his next book came out.
But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.
It would be preposterously naive to suggest that a B.
A. can be made as attractive to girls as a marriage license.
Sometimes the most preposterous lies are the most believable.
Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?