Patronizing Quotes

“Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.”
― Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“Don't be so damned patronizing. Your performance so far has been a little less than dazzling."
"I didn't mean no harm," I said and kissed her. "That a new dress?"
"Ah! Changing the subject, you coward.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“You know, I think some people fear that if they like the wrong kind of book, it will reflect poorly on them. It can go with genre, too. Somebody will say, “I won’t read science fiction, or I won’t read young adult novels”—all of those genres can become prisons. I always find it funny when the serious literary world will make a little crack in its wall and allow in one pet genre writer and crown them and say, “Well Elmore Leonard is actually a real writer.” Or “Stephen King is actually a really good writer.” Generally speaking, you know you’re being patronized when somebody uses the word “actually”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Sure, call me Hades!”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“She approached them all without a trace of sentimentality or condescension. The older Docklanders were accustomed to meeting middle-class do-gooders, who deigned to act graciously to inferiors. The Cockneys despised these people, used them for what they could get, and made fun of them behind their backs, but Sister Evangelina had no patronising airs and graces.”
― Jennifer Worth

“Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“…have you always been a jackass or is that something you’ve just recently acquired at the ‘I Want to be a Junior Jackass’ store? -Weasel to Army Lieutenant”
― Ray Palla, H: Infidels of Oil

“He wouldn't tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you you can let your feelings choose you because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn't have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn't have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Worse, they suggested this was a considerate move for the protection of women, conveniently disguising their discrimination with a thin veneer of patronizing gallantry.”
― Qanta A. Ahmed, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor's Journey in the Saudi Kingdom

“Kindness that is fueled by guilt, pity, or colonialism is not kindness at all. Kindness is not currency or a commodity to be used to barter and bargain away the sins of our past or to alleviate our responsibility to be part of global recovery efforts in times of tragedy.”
― Bruce Reyes-Chow, In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World

“It’s a peculiar feature of human nature that we love to see those close to us, climb up the staircase of success, but, behind us. If they happen to catch up with us, needing to share the space with them, we feel choked, and were they to overtake us, we feel morose, though they might remain friendly. It is because, used as we were to condescend to descend in our affections to them, we lose countenance, not counting our jealousy, that they too might seem patronizing from their altered stations.”
― B.S. Murthy, Benign Flame: Saga of Love

“In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: ‘this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty’. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: ‘this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy’; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien