ridicule

The devil's happy when the critics run you off.

My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.

We must be passionate and controlled but not reckless. Truth is not established by shame, guilt, or coercion or tribalism. It must be established by reason, evidence, presentation, compassion, and yes, faith. It cannot be established by ridicule, mocking, or insults of sacred icons or traditions but by disproving them or establishing their lack or veracity or usefulness.

There goes the girl with the wings," they say. "The damned dreamer with her eyes shut to the world.""There goes the misguided soul with her heart buried in the ground."They taunt. They lie. They lie. THEY LIE.I don't pretend to understand life. THEY LIE.

You can cease to be influenced by people who tease you... Just neglect their helps and elevate your steps... You can do it!

Ridicule is a terrible witherer of the flower of imagination. It binds us where we should be free.

A man does not have to feel less than human to realize his sin; oppositely, he has to realize that he gets no special vindication for his sin.

As for those who spite you, and seemingly just because, it's only evident that they're learning from you. Maybe you taste bad - kind of like medicine, kind of like truth - and to them, you're thought unsafe. There is flattery in being chewed out and spit up. Humans have always had a hard time digesting foreign things.

The crazy creatives are the creatives who never go completely mad. They aren't so easily disheartened by the seemingly endless amounts of scrutiny that creative individuals tend to receive because they, like insanity, are the ones who feed off of opposition and negative feedback and manage to continue along with a healthy ambition. It is the crazy that teaches us to use our gifts wisely and own all the attackers.

Some skeptics believe religious people are religious because they fear Hell. It's about as fair as saying skeptics are skeptics because they fear the ridicule of modern society.

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimised by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Daly (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilise 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the catharthic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

To believers, the bible is a holy book, to unbelievers, it is a story book.

Ridicule is the best test of truth.

It is very normal for one ugly weed to not want to stand alone.

A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena.

A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey.

Take lightly what you hear about individuals. We need not distort trust for our paltry little political agendas. We tend to trust soulless, carried information more than we trust soulful human beings; but really most people aren't so bad once you sit down and have an honest, one-on-one conversation with them, once, with an open heart, you listen to their explanations as to why they act the way they act, or say what they say, or do what they do.

Everyone pretends to be 'free thinkers', but few individuals pass the line into expressive territories that may be detrimental to their own social well-being.