Discredit Quotes

It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come. (Whittaker Chambers)
The world is full of vulgar Purists, who bring discredit on all selection by the silliness of their choice; and this the more, because the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things. View quote
John Ruskin
To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him. View quote
Alvin Plantinga
It is not "scientism" to concede the objectivity and precision of good science, any more than it is history worship to concede that Napoleon did once rule in France and the Holocaust actually happened. Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders. View quote
Daniel Dennett
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence. View quote
Gregory Maguire
A polite enemy is just as difficult to discredit, as a rude friend is to protect. View quote
Bryant H. McGill
For me, I'm just trying to be the best at what I do. I'll wave an Asian American flag if I get that opportunity. I'm not hiding or trying to discredit my background or anything, I just haven't had the opportunity. View quote
Chad Hugo
When your voice contradicts reality and truth, the only way to create space for it is to discredit reality and truth. View quote
John Yarmuth
If, on occasion, the knowledge brought by science leads to an unhappy end, this is not to the discredit of science but is rather an indication of an imperfect ability to use wisely the gifts placed within our hands. View quote
Polykarp Kusch
Since eighteenth century writers employed reason to discredit Christian dogma, a "rationalist" in common parlance came to mean an "unbeliever"... But this use of the word is unfortunate since it obscures the fact that reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it. View quote
Carl L. Becker
I've found during my almost twenty years in Washington that the tendency to personalize differences has grown to be an accepted way of doing business. One need not do the hard work of dissecting an argument. One need only attack and thus discredit the person making the argument. Though the matter being debated is not effectively resolved, the debate is reduced to unilateral pronouncements and glib but quotable cliches. (Clarence Thomas)
The great writers-Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Max Weber, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and others-knew that thought is subversive. They challenged and critiqued the dominant narrative, assumptions and structures that buttress power. They freed us. They did not cater to the latest fashion of the academy or popular culture. They did not seek adulation. They did not build pathetic monuments to themselves. They elucidated difficult and hard truths. They served humanity. They lifted up voices the power elites seek to discredit, marginalize or crush. View quote
Chris Hedges
It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party's betrayal of the working class and the party's subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit détente between the world's two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas-including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. View quote
Chris Hedges
It is no exaggeration to say that the central aim of socialism is to discredit those traditional morals which keep us alive. View quote
Friedrich Hayek
Josh's actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, 'inexcusable,' but that doesn't mean 'unforgivable.' He and his family dealt with it and were honest and open about it with the victims and the authorities. No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story. Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things. [...] They are no more perfect a family than any family, but their Christian witness is not marred in our eyes because following Christ is not a declaration of our perfection, but of HIS perfection. [...] Let others run from them. We will run to them with our support. View quote
Mike Huckabee
Whenever Israel faces a public relations debacle such as the Intifada or international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, American Jewish organizations orchestrate this extravaganza called the 'new anti-Semitism.' The purpose is several-fold. First, it is to discredit any charges by claiming the person is an anti-Semite. It's to turn Jews into the victims, so that the victims are not the Palestinians any longer. As people like Abraham Foxman of the ADL put it, the Jews are being threatened by a new holocaust. It's a role reversal – the Jews are now the victims, not the Palestinians. So it serves the function of discrediting the people leveling the charge. It's no longer Israel that needs to leave the Occupied Territories; it's the Arabs who need to free themselves of the anti-Semitism. View quote
Norman Finkelstein
Post-9/11, the American media were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic 'conspiracy theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life. View quote
Gore Vidal
Many conservative writers have contended that the tendency to equality in modern social movements is the expression of envy. In this way they seek to discredit this trend, attributing it to collectively harmful impulses. View quote
John Rawls
It is quite bizarre that scholars trying to prove a point discredit their own case by using a proven forgery without any comment. View quote
Koenraad Elst
Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques. View quote
Arnold J. Toynbee
I don't suppose any first-class work in science is done now outside of the war work ... Of course ... science has fallen into discredit. It has brought no solution to our human problems, and has added greatly to our engines of destruction in this war. Not that science is to blame for this misuse, but people judge by results, and by that standard science has a heavy account to liquidate. Science so far has had far too much to do with the things of sense and of matter, and the things of the spirit have been by-passed. (Jan Smuts)
Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax....You need to have fear. You needed to have the fear of starvation. You needed to have the fear of the whole place going to hell in a handbasket. Which - do we have that fear now with global warming?...Then you have to discredit the scientists that say "That's not right." And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did. That's what Al Gore, the U. N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon. View quote
Glenn Beck
The noise against me is only the means by which the Jews and Communists are attempting and with good success to implement a further dismemberment of Germany. I think that if I resigned as I threatened to do yesterday, it would simply discredit me to no purpose. . . This august lady [Fifteenth Army] . . . has the job of reviewing the strategy and tactics of the war to see how the former conformed to the unit plans and how the tactics changed. Were it not for the fact that it will be, so far as I am concerned, a kick up stairs, I would like it much better than being a sort of executioner to the best race in Europe. Later when people wake up to what is going on here, I can admit why I took the job. Am I weak and a coward? Am I putting my posthumous reputation above my present honor? God how I wish I knew... P.S. No one gives a damn how well Bavaria is run. All they are interested in now is how well it is ruined. View quote
George S. Patton
Our ultimate task is to find interpretative procedures that will uncover each bias and discredit its claims to universality. When this is done the eighteenth century can be formally closed and a new era that has been here a long time can be officially recognised. The individual human being, stripped of his humanity, is of no use as a conceptual base from which to make a picture of human society. No human exists except steeped in the culture of his time and place. The falsely abstracted individual has been sadly misleading to Western political thought. But now we can start again at a point where major streams of thought converge, at the other end, at the making of culture. Cultural analysis sees the whole tapestry as a whole, the picture and the weaving process, before attending to the individual threads. View quote
Mary Douglas
Timothy McVeigh was a coward. Violence is the stupid way out. It'll discredit any real legitmate movement. View quote
Glenn Beck