Discourse

"Children are simultaneously the victims of predators and vulnerable to exposure to dangerous images. All accompanied by the shrill cry of 'will no one think of the children?'"

"Moral panic has become in current media discourse the inevitable outcome of any story involving 'youth': in the blogosphere, 'Won't someone think of the children!' — the imagined battle-cry of the faux-outraged columnist — is in danger of becoming the new Godwin's law'"

"Since the early days of computer regulation, hysterics have made recourse to the 'Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse': child pornographers, organized crime, terrorists, and pirates. Invoking one or more of these terrible fellows is often sufficient to stifle further debate and end critical thought ... 'Won't someone think of the children?!'"

"The problem with using the 'Won't anyone think of the children' defence when arguing against adoption rights for LGBT couples is that, because there isn't a shred of evidence to support your argument (on the contrary, it discriminates against children already born) -- what you're really saying can be interpreted as: 'Those gays can get married and do whatever it is they like to each other but I wouldn't trust some of them near a child.'"

"Too many people these days are thinking of the children, or at least claiming to think of them. Keeping kids safe and virginal — protected from seeing the 'wrong' things — is the rallying concept so many people use to forward their agendas. Ban this, eliminate that, censor the other thing — it's all done in the name of protecting children. Not, heaven forbid, because anyone wants to force their morality and sensibility on the rest of us. Perish the thought."

"Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such unedifying conversation as about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes, beds, garlands, perfumes, relatives, carriages, villages, towns and cities, countries, women, heroes, street- and well-gossip, talk of the departed, desultory chat, speculations about land and sea, talk about being and non-being, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such conversation."

"Ein guter Mensch redet von nichts gern außer Gott."

"He that hath knowledge spareth his words. Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding."

"The highest function of philosophy is to enforce the attitude of meditation and therewithal restrain the excessive volubility of the tongue. To us it seems that the reflective thinker wins his greatest victories when by what he says he compels us to recognise the relative insignificance of anything he can say. His task is not to capture Reality, but to free it from captivity."

"Too many tongues have gates which fly apart"

"Reticence is not just an artistic virtue, but a human one. It acknowledges the depth of meaning to be found in words unspoken."

"Knowledge without know-how is sterile. We use the word 'academic' in a pejorative sense to identify this limitation."

"What is odd is how fairly quickly the concept of geek has moved from pejorative to almost complimentary."

"A current pejorative adjective is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those "liberals" who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism. But then to reverse, periodically, the meanings of words is a very small price to pay for our vast freedom not only to conform but to consume."

"Lately the word progress has taken on a pejorative meaning, implying superiority over those who “have not progressed as far,” namely, they have not adopted the values or the standard of living defined by the Industrial West, because they are either not able or not willing to encourage the development of science and technology. I do not mean progress to have this pejorative sense."

"Chileans often pride themselves on being "the English of South America" or "the Switzerland of South America", yet in the football stadiums and fanzines their Bolivian and Peruvian call them "Mapochos", a pejorative corruption of Mapuches."

"Scholars who study cults (or, as many prefer to call them by the less pejorative term, “New Religious Movements”) explain that there is no simple answer to the question “Who joins cults?” The only consistent variable seems to be age—young .people are likely to join the cults than older people."

"The word that came to denote this set of characteristics in parliamentary propaganda was, of course, "cavalier" and it is … By the early seventeenth century, it had acquired pejorative connotations — "a poor beggerly knight that hath nothing but his sword and cloak and a knight of drawen sword that an excellent whoremonger or a notable wincher.”"

"There seems to be justification for assuming that Theophrastus employed the term in a pejorative sense of "pedant", but we should adhere to the positive meaning “scholastic”."

"Common toadflax (Linaria vulgaris) is a curiously shaped flower that gives rise to the name 'cod's head' in Norwegian, and in dialect nomenclature it has been likened to a variety of other animals' mouths: dog, rabbit, mouse, lion, monkey and so on. Its colouration accounts for the alternative English name of butter-and-eggs; the eggyolk-orange part gets darker as it matures. The plant can become very invasive and is regarded as a weed. Being hard to distinguish amongst true flax until it flowered it was awarded a pejorative affiliation with toads."

"Classification is now a pejorative statement. You know, these classifiers look like “dumb fools.” I’m a classifier. But I’d like to use a word that includes more than what people consider is encompassed by classification. It is more than that, and it’s something which can be called phenomenology."

"Slurs possess interesting linguistic properties and so have recently attracted the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. For instance the racial slur nigger is explosively derogatory, enough so that just hearing it mentioned can leave one feeling as if they have been made complicit in a morally atrocious act... Although I have considered not even mentioning such a derogatory term as nigger in the first place, I chose it because on the one hand there is a substantive literature on the term upon which to draw to aid in the analysis of slurs in general, and on the other hand, this term highlights the fact that slurs possess a forcefully potent affective component that is clearly a key aspect to their employment."

"There may be exceptional circumstances when anonymous pejorative quotes paraphrase anonymous pejorative quotes"

"That reference to Holy Rollers — a possibly pejorative term that certainly won't endear him to the religious right — is one reason O’Reilly can be such a fascinating figure to some gay activists."

"And while he's been described by what has become a pejorative for quarterbacks - "game manager" - he's really done more than that."

"The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started."

"They called him mountebank and sorcerer, fakir in a pejorative sense of the Petro Asson, and other names associated with cheap charlatans who would raise the dead for 15 dollars and change."

"Yellow journalism is the sneering pejorative perhaps most frequently associated with misconduct in news gathering. Indeed, for more than 100 years, it has served as a derisive shorthand for denouncing journalists and their misdeeds, real and imagined. It is an evocative term that has been diffused internationally, in contexts as Greece and Nigeria, as Israel and India. The precise origins of the phrase, however, long been murky, and its derivation has been a source of periodic dispute among a scholars."

"From the outer space perspective, there is no sideways force (that is, perpendicular to the plane of swing) deflecting the sway of the pendulum. That is why the somewhat pejorative term "fictitious" is attached to this force."

"Operation Wetback used in 1954 is the code name derived from the derogatory term wetback, or mojado, which literally translated means "wet." The pejorative word mojado is used to describe an individual who crosses the border illegally, because often the crossing entails physically getting across the Rio Grande River, which means the individual emerges on the other side wet."

"I just love bossy women. I could be around them all day. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term at all. It means somebody’s passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn't mind leading."

"We should be honest about our sources, even if we can't name them. The New York Times policy on pejorative quotes is worth bearing in mind: The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source."

"Fan is a widely admired figure in Britain, atleast among men. Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere."

"Worse, the term tends to be pejorative and is certainly murky. It refers most properly these days to the popular, Hindi-language, song-and-dance extravaganzas produced by studios based in Mumbai."

"We reach the second half of the twentieth century still tumbling with pros and cons of using the notion of primitive. Some consider it to be quite acceptable, together with barbarism, pagan, and savage, because nothing pejorative is found in their ]]etymological]] origins: Primitive, pagan, and savage, are, then, perfectly respectable words. But primate is the most widely disseminated, in the most recognizable forms, in major languages and has, even today, the least pejorative associations, signifying merely a prior state of affairs, a relative sense of origins."

"We understand the inappropriateness of these pejorative quotes; nonetheless, although distasteful, we believe that the reactions of these unfortunate spirits interned in sanatorium-like or purgatorial regions must appear in the present account so that we may not evade the truth."

"Say what you mean, and mean what you say because the words that you choose matter. When you use 'gay' in a pejorative way, the effect that it has on the gay kid in the room or the kid with gay relatives is that being gay is less than or inferior to. [BASED]"

"Most students had heard pejorative references to patients, but few thought the practice useful. Monitoring such usage may help identify individual or institutional problems and lead to better management strategies for certain subgroups of patients."

"The pejorative term 'political correctness' was adapted to express disapproval of the enlargement of etiquette to cover all people, in spite of this being a principle to which all Americans claim to subscribe."

"While terms such as 'soft news', 'dumbing down', 'tabloidisation' or 'commercialisation' are often pejoratively invoked to describe an approach or style of journalism, it is less clear what these values actually are..."

"Group-specific policy focusing on special services and resources for disability category members logically follows from corporeal medical-diagnostic definitions of disability. In opposition, however, to what was perceived as a pejorative, the distal view of disability indicts social, cultural, and other environmental influences as disabling factors regardless of one’s body."

"The employee will never denounce his superiors if society continues to treat him as a whistle-blower (pejorative connotation in the business world), a tattletale or sneak (pejorative connotation at school), an informer (pejorative connotation from the German occupation), a stool pigeon (pejorative connotation in the Soviet Union), or a squealer (pejorative connotation from the underworld)."

"As Germany prepares for national elections in September, Merkel has dropped the language of freedom entirely. Instead, she talks about solidarity, justice and security. It is as if freedom had become a pejorative term, especially in the context of the global financial crisis."

"[W]e better know there is fire whence we see much smoke rising than we could know it by one or two witnesses swearing to it. The witnesses may commit perjury, but the smoke cannot."

"My suit has nothing to do with the assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbor. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannæ, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Syllæ, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats."

"I think it is a canon, which any one who is familiar with Courts of justice will recognise as a just one, that instead of assuming that people are perjuring themselves, you should, if there is a view by which you can reconcile all the testimony, prefer that to the view which places people in the position of contradicting each other, so that they must necessarily be swearing what is false. . . . The point as to having seen the witnesses and having had an opportunity of judging whether they were speaking the truth or not is generally a very powerful one."

"We can judge only from appearances, and from the evidence produced to us."

"Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum."

"Qui semel a veritate deflexit, hic non majore religione ad perjurium quam ad mendacium perduci consuevit."

"It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine that they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances of a given case, and the surest check, often the only check, on such perjury, is to recognize the impossibility that men of larger instruction and resources and experience could have been guilty of such conduct."