Marshall McLuhan Quotes

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. […] Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity.

People are never more sincere than when they assume their own moral superiority.

No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.

I'm not a virtue signaler.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

We are living in a sanctimonious age.

I am always suspicious of righteous indignation. Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation.

We are never more self-righteous than when giving up what we should have shunned all along.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red.

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

A sense of righteousness is even more dangerous than a violent temper.

Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda.

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself, for which only he can provide justice and bring a righteous resolution.

Watch the too indignantly righteous. Before long you will find them committing or condoning the very offence which they have so fiercely censured.

Let us watch against PRIDE in every shapepride of intellect, pride of wealth, pride in our own goodness.

what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority

To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.

It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.