Outrage Quotes

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken, Prejudices First Series

“The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“1. Bullying is not okay. Period.

2. Freedom of religion does not give you the right to physically or verbally assault people.

3. If your sincerely-held religious beliefs require you to bully children, then your beliefs are fucked up.”
― Jim C. Hines

“People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“If you aren't outraged, then you just aren't paying attention”
― Lisa Borden, The Alphabet of Avoidance: Simple solutions to immediately replace ‘bad’ habits with something better...or even, nothing at all.

“When any worthwhile thing is done in the world, it's usually done by somebody weird.”
― John Sandford, Outrage

“Social outrage is power protecting itself; it is not morality.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“They call good evil and evil good. There are those who are so easily offended that they lose their ability to ever discern any truth, and this is often derived from a sort of frenzy by way of their own masked prejudice.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“Sexually active? Sexually active? Patrick and I hadn't even learned the fine points of kissing yet!
I marched on down. 'For your information,' I said from the doorway, as both Dad and Lester jerked to attention, 'I am about as sexually active as a bag of spinach, and if you want to keep me on the porch and not out in the park somewhere behind the bushes, you'll keep the stupid porch light off when I come home with a boy.”
― Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice on the Outside

“The first thing people usually do when they decide to reduce the outrage in their lives is stop talking about politics altogether - or at least stop arguing with people who disagree with them. This is exactly the wrong response. We are supposed to argue about politics; we're just supposed to figure out how to do it without shouting at the top of our lungs and calling each other stupid or evil.

Democracy calls us to have uncomfortable conversations. It asks us to listen to each other even when we would rather be listening to ourselves - or to people enough like us that we might as well be listening to ourselves. It is easier and more comfortable for us to live in perpetual high dudgeon inside our echo chambers than it is to have a meaningful conversation with people who disagree with us. The entire outrage industry has been designed to keep us in our bubbles, never challenged by disagreement and never required to think that we might be wrong.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

“[I]t seems that everyone has fallen under the thrall of this idea that we’re all writers and dramatists now, that each of us has a special voice and something very important to say, usually about a feeling we have, and all this gets expressed in the black maw of social media billions of times a day. Usually this feeling is outrage, because outrage gets attention, outrage gets clicks, outrage can make your voice heard above the deafening din of voices squalling over one another in this nightmarish new culture—and the outrage is often tied to a lunacy demanding human perfection, spotless citizens, clean and likable comrades, and requiring thousands of apologies daily. Advocating
while creating your own drama and your brand is where the game is now. And if you don’t follow the new corporate rules accordingly you are banished, exiled, erased from history.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, White

“A shallow reading of a problem begets outrage; a detailed approach to a problem encourages moderation.”
― Dan Crenshaw, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage

“Angry people are not often wise.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Just as the Buddha taught, it’s important to see suffering as suffering. We are not talking about ignoring or keeping quiet. When we don’t buy into our opinions and solidify the sense of enemy, we will accomplish something. If we don’t get swept away by our outrage, then we will see the cause of suffering more clearly. That is how the cessation of suffering evolves.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Complacency has taken the place of outrage and demands for justice have been substituted for trending hashtags and unified profile pictures.”
― Aysha Taryam

“We are scared little mammals with millions of years of evolution telling us to scurry away from anything or anyone who threatens our well-being, but outrage culture gives us a script that we can follow: simply adopt a sneering, angry tone and repeat all of the talking points from our favorite blog or radio show while insisting that anyone who disagrees is crazy, stupid, or evil.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

“...outrage is one of the gifts a person receives after enduring trauma.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“...trauma happens to everyone, sooner or later, to some degree.

Once you survive trauma, outrage is the warning bell that sounds when you hear truth being distorted by those who haven't passed through shadowed valleys.”
― Ruth Everhart, Ruined

“The world should be outraged by the man-made tragedies and this outrage must be translated to a global fight that involves activists, diplomats and civil society leaders. It must be articulated in words that set the unjust on fire, that light the way for those innocents being persecuted and maybe, just maybe, put an end to their suffering.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumors that justify their emotional states, and also to attribute those events to intentional action.”
― Cass R. Sunstein, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

“Russia's plan to subvert American democracy by advertising in our echo chambers could not have succeeded, however, if we had not already done most of the hard work of tearing ourselves apart. Foreign enemies did not convince us to start hating each other; we did that ourselves. We wanted to believe that candidates from the other side were murderers and child abusers and that their supporters despised their own country so much that they didn't care. For the cyberattack to succeed - and by all accounts it succeeded beyond anybody's expectations - we had to be prepared to believe the worst things about each other that a hostile foreign spy could invent.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

“Outrage without action is nothing but vanity.”
― Garon Whited, Void

“Maybe it is just easier to focus on life’s trivial missteps when the real challenges feel so insurmountable. But by doing this aren’t we also exhausting ourselves on petty grievances and leaving nothing in the tank for the real issues?”
― Ashley Dotty Charles

“Don’t boo, vote - Barack Obama 2016
We intellectualise society’s faults, dissecting them on Facebook pages…… but rarely do we make the necessary strides to affect change in the real world. We boo, but we don’t vote! We need to transfer our resistance from the internet to the real world and reignite purposeful outrage that drove society forward in the offline era.”
― Ashley Dotty Charles

“Social Media outrage and activists are selective. They bash , cancel and fight whom they hate, but protect whom they like. It is not about right or wrong. Who is hurt , who is in pain. What the law says or what really happened. They don't care about facts. They only push their own agenda.”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“Fake or selective outrage has destroyed many lives in the society or community”
― D.J. Kyos

“Outrage and aspersions prove your idiocy and ignorance.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Why were some people fated, like Job, to live a never-ending debate between themselves and their sense of what they believed life should be? Why did some hearts feel insulted at being alive, humiliated at the terms of existence? It was as though one felt that one had been promised something and when that promise had not been kept, one felt a sense of loss that made life intolerable; it was as though one was angry, but did not know toward what or whom the anger should be directed; it was as though one felt betrayed, but could never determine the manner of the betrayal.”
― Richard Wright, The Outsider