"Asinine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement—or one will have to pay dearly for it!—"He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me to be right"—this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... original owners of the soil; with far greater reason we in the far East might shout, "China for the Chinese", "Japan for the Japanese". I will quote Mr. T. S. Sutton, English Secretary of the Chinese-American League of Justice, on this point. "The most asinine whine in the world," he says, "is that of 'America for the Americans' or 'China for the Chinese', etc. It is the hissing slogan of greed, fear, envy, selfishness, ignorance and prejudice. No man, no human being ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... constant association with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of it," he says, "the French entered into my empty brain"; but he is careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... is surely a disastrous spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No better;—if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure of the hemp round their neck!—My friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my head. I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think about, in the dark, and when he is alone, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... glasses, and sneezed. Then he smoothed out the already remarkably smooth hairs he had left on his head, rubbed his hands as if he were beginning to feel quite at home, and tittered when there was any sign of a stoppage in his asinine eloquence. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... must rewrite it! It's impossible to leave it, for it is in a devil of a mess. My God! if the public likes my works as little as I do those of other people which I am reading, what an ass I am! There is something asinine about our writing.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... nowhere such a problem. There are twelve thousand horses, for one thing, to be shod, geared, kept roadworthy and regular; say six thousand country wagoners, thick-soled peasants: then, hanging to the skirts of these, in miscellaneous crazy vehicles and weak teams, equine and asinine, are one or two thousand sutler people, male and female, not of select quality, though on them, too, we keep a sharp eye. The series covers many miles, as many as twenty English miles (says Tempelhof), unless in favorable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle |
