#monstrous

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness, images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact, forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century. ↗

— Dennis Prager

#cause #century #changing #conform #evil

Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. ↗

— Grandmaster Flash

#brand new #buy #dare #disco #few

I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act. ↗

— Jurgen Habermas

#cannot #comprehensible #context #crime #day

New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines. ↗

— Federico Garcia Lorca

#greatest #i #lie #like #lost

But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous. When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals. ↗

— Michelangelo Buonarroti

#grotesque #imagination #monstrous #art

With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents. ↗

— Omar N. Bradley

#being #danger #humanity #man #monstrous

Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#cell #cells #chicken #conditions #different

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#city #country #darkness #familiar #friendly

A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it. ↗

— Jean Rostand

#enough #few #great #great minds #hearts

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men: when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon 'savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.' ("The Wendigo") ↗

— Algernon Blackwood

#monster #monstrous #nature #primeval #primeval-man