Vacuous Quotes:

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

- Malcolm Muggeridge

topic: Gossip, Television, Vacuous, Vacuity

Musical acts that feign enthusiasm for what they're doing the guitarist who jumps up and down, like it's choreographed are so transparently vacuous.

- John Maus

source: Source: pitchfork.com

topic: Musical, Enthusiasm, Vacuous

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

- Cyril Connolly

source: "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

topic: Dream, Selfish, Night, Scabs, Vacuous

Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.

- Noam Chomsky

source: Noam Chomsky (2004). “Language and Politics”, p.345, AK Press

topic: Simple, Issues, Effort, Vacuous, Political Issues

Maybe our young people are not as vacuous as we would like to lead ourselves to believe - that all they're interested in is hairdos and looking at other beautiful people. Maybe they're interested in learning something.

- David James Elliott

source: "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

topic: Beautiful, Believe, People, Vacuous, Hairdos

The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

- Cormac McCarthy

source: "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" by Richard B. Woodward, archive.nytimes.com. April 19, 1992.

topic: Giving Up, Ideas, Soul, Vacuous, Dangerous Ideas

The price of liberty is, in addition to eternal vigilance, eternal patience with the vacuous blather occasionally expressed from behind the shield of free speech.

- Michael Shermer

topic: Liberty, Speech, Libertarian, Vacuous, Blather

Again and again parents describe...the trancelike nature of their children's television watching. The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth. The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look.

- Marie Winn

topic: Children, Eye, Expression, Vacuous, Facial

It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?

- Richard Dawkins

topic: Christian, Ignorance, Astrology, Vacuous, Vikings

You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

- Damian Lewis

topic: Jobs, Writing, Film, Vacuous

It's one thing for a person to live his life as a vacuous shell without fully comprehending the extent of his transgressions, but I was guilty of the greater sin; I knew what was right, and I chose to reject it.

- Tarek Saab

topic: Shells, Sin, Guilty, Vacuous

Such a divine profession is art! When everything else looks so stale and disgustingly vacuous, so enthralls even the littlest real effort of art our innermost and carries us from town, from country, from earth, as that it must be truely a blessing of the Gods.

- Felix Mendelssohn

topic: Country, Art, Real, Vacuous

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

- Anton Chekhov

source: "Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends: With Biographical Sketch". Book by Anton Chekhov, 1920.

topic: Vapid, Mediocrity, Useless, Vacuous, Philistines

Sometimes the intention is to shock us. But what is shocking first time around is boring and vacuous when repeated.

- Roger Scruton

topic: Firsts, Sometimes, Boring, Vacuous

Now, because men of our contemporary age are caught up in the ascetic view of a life-denying religious system, but in spite of this cannot deny the primal laws of nature, a distorted morality had to be developed, which spreads hypocritical appearances over hidden actions. This has brought to a head all those outward forms of modern life, whose vacuousness and corruption are now beginning to disgust us.

- Guido von List

topic: Religious, Men, Views, Modernity, Vacuous

In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

- David F. Wells

topic: Character, Personality, Culture, Vacuous, Postmodern

Artificial glamor-false eyelashes, that sort of thing-usually is put on to hide a vacuum. The most beautiful face can only look vacuous if it masks an empty head.

- Peter Ustinov

topic: Beautiful, Eyelashes, Vacuums, Vacuous, Empty Heads

The disappearance of theology from the life of the Church, and the orchestration of that disappearance by some of its leaders, is hard to miss today, but oddly enough, not easy to prove. It is hard to miss in the evangelical world--in the vacuous worship that is so prevalent, for example, in the shift form God to the self as the central focus of faith, in the psychologized preaching that follows this shift, in the erosion of its conviction, in its strident pragmatism, in its inability to think incisively about the culture, in its reveling in the irrational.

- David F. Wells

topic: Thinking, Erosion, Self, Pragmatism, Orchestration

Speaking of [Colin] Kaepernick, did you see what [Barack] Obama said about Kaepernick? I mean this was the biggest dodge I have ever seen. This may have been the most vacuous or empty statement on anything, because Obama clearly wanted to agree with Kaepernick but couldn't.

- Rush Limbaugh

source: Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

topic: Mean, May, Kaepernick, Vacuous

"The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger.

- Kenny Smith

topic: Philosophy, Self, People, Immediacy, Obviousness

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

- Quentin S. Crisp

topic: Space, Want, Materialism, Vacuous

Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health.

- Rodney A. Smolla

topic: Political, Junk, News, Vacuous, Junk Food

One filmmaker makes films that are deep, intellectual, profound and confrontational. And the other one makes purely vacuous, escapist films. I'm not sure the one who makes escapist films is making a poorer contribution than the one who makes the deeper films.

- Woody Allen

topic: Profound, Intellectual, Film, Escapists, Vacuous

Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.

- Thomas Szasz

source: "Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry". Book by Thomas Szasz and Karl Kraus (p. 67), March 1, 1990.

topic: Confused, Men, Race, Passerby, Vacuous

When griefs are genuine, I find, there is nothing more vacuous, more burdensome, or even more impertinent, than letters of consolation.

- Lord Chesterfield

topic: Sympathy, Grief, Letters, Vacuous

Of course the theory of evolution would be vacuous if it offered a glib explanation for every inexplicable act.

- Steven Pinker

topic: Theory Of Evolution, Atheism, Would Be, Vacuous

One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.

- Glen Duncan

topic: Optimism, Idiot, Madness, Vacuous

First of all you must understand that practising martial arts means studying a certain oriental philosophy of life, otherwise it's merely a vacuous sport devoid of any significance.

- William C. Brown

topic: Sports, Art, Philosophy, Vacuous

Romney and Democratic rival President Obama have led their partisan backers down a trail of lies, negativity and vacuous policies that seem certain to guarantee an angry electorate four more years of gridlock.

- Ron Fournier

topic: Lying, Years, Negativity, Vacuous, Gridlock

I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves.

- David Bentley Hart

topic: Ocean, Ignorance, Self, Vacuous, Misrepresentation

We're at a time when we are being presented with undeniable changes in the global climate and fundamental issues that affect every single one of us, and it's the time we're listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. Which is fine, you know, but personally speaking, I can't do that.

- Thom Yorke

topic: Issues, Bullshit, Listening, Vacuous

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

- Susan Vreeland

topic: Kissing, Texture, Joints, Vacuous, Fledglings