Profanity

"CURSE, v.t. Energetically to belabor with a verbal slap-stick. This is an operation which in literature, particularly in the drama, is commonly fatal to the victim. Nevertheless, the liability to a cursing is a risk that cuts but a small figure in fixing the rates of life insurance."

"Jack was embarrassed—never hero more, And as he knew not what to say, he swore."

"First of all you – you fucking fake Christians – don’t fucking question my Christianity. I grew up in the church. My grandfather was a minister, who is with God now and talks to me in my dreams from God’s corner office. I am a former Sunday school teacher. I taught the Bible to children and showed them how to love God and invite him into their hearts. I believe in God – but I don’t fear him. God is my best friend. God is my ally. God is my boyfriend. God is my best fag. I am God’s fag hag cuz didn’t you know, God is a big fag. Serious bottom too. Butch in the streets, femme in the sheets. That is my God. God is my biggest fan. God gets me, dude."

"Look, I can't speak without swearing, and I've only got my Grade 10, and I haven't had a cigarette since I've been arrested, and I'm ready to fuckin' snap. So I'd like to make a request under the people's freedom of choices and voices act that I be able to smoke and swear in your courtroom. Because if I can't smoke and swear, I'm fucked! And so are all these guys. I won't be able to properly express myself at a court level, and that's bullshit! It's not fair and if you ask me, I think it's a fuckin' mistrial."

"Bad language or abuse I never, never use, Whatever the emergency; Though "Bother it" I may Occasionally say, I never never use a big, big D."

"Take not His name, who made thy mouth, in vain; It gets thee nothing, and hath no excuse."

"There written all Black as the damning drops that fall From the denouncing Angel's pen Ere Mercy weeps them out again."

"What's the big deal? It doesn't hurt anybody. Fuck, fucky, fuckity, fuck-fuck-fuck."

"I’m always amused by those commentators who nervously insist that the working class’s constant use of the word fuck is really just “a form of punctuation.” It is, however, no more or less then what they dread: an inexhaustible river of smelted wrath, a Phlegethon of ancestral grievance."

"When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. … As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence."

"If you can't spontaneously detect (without analyzing) the difference between the sacred and profane, you'll never know what religion means. You will also never figure out what we commonly call art. You will never understand anything."

"And then a whoreson jackanapes must take me up for swearing; as if I borrowed mine oaths of him and might not spend them at my pleasure."

"When a gentleman is disposed to swear, it is not for any standers-by to curtail his oaths."

"I'll be damned for never a king's son in Christendom."

"That in the captain's but a choleric word, Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy."

"Do not swear at all; Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry, And I'll believe thee."

"For it comes to pass oft that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned him."

""He shall not die, by God," cried my uncle Toby. The Accusing Spirit which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath, blushed as he gave it in: and the Recording Angel as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out forever."

"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders."

"The General is sorry to be informed —, that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing, a vice heretofore little known in an American army, is growing into a fashion; — he hopes the officers will, by example as well as influence, endeavor to check it, and that both they and the men will reflect that we can have little hope of the blessing of Heaven on our arms, if we insult it by impiety and folly; added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense and character detests and despises it."

"A demon holds a book, in which are written the sins of a particular man; an Angel drops on it from a phial, a tear which the sinner had shed in doing a good action, and his sins are washed out."

"And each blasphemer quite escape the rod, Because the insult's not on man, but God?"

"In totum jurare, nisi ubi necesse est, gravi viro parum convenit."