When a chance came, he caught the hero in a rush of flame and clamped sharp fangs into his neck. Beowulf’s body ran wet with his life-blood: it came welling out. – Beowulf, Seamus Heaney (trans.) Lines 2690-2693: The dragon seizes Beowulf by the neck with its poisonous fangs.
Most of the Women’s Libbers I knew really didn’t want to have a piece of the men’s pie. They thought that pie was kind of poisonous, toxic, really full of weapons, poison gases, all kinds of mean junk we didn’t even want a slice of. – Grace Paley
Brothers, the white people are like poisonous serpents: when chilled they are feeble and harmless, but invigorate them with warmth and they sting their benefactors to death. – Tecumseh Speech to the Osages, winter 1811-1812.
In a sense, all of my books have been about a ‘poisonous pedagogy,’ which engenders a culture of obedience, this underlying theme of patriarchal systems. – John Bradshaw
Terrorists, in ungoverned spaces, disseminate poisonous propaganda and training materials to attract troubled souls around the world to their cause. – James Comey
Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. – Alveda King
What we do know absolutely is that human lives are worth more than grapes and that innocent-looking grapes on the table may disguise poisonous residues hidden deep inside where washing cannot reach. – Cesar Chavez
Say you have cancer – you have this broad thing we call cancer; we’re going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level. – Bill Maris
Families can be the most detrimental things to have in your life. They are sometimes the most poisonous relationships that people have. Sometimes family is the thing that keeps you from ever achieving what you want to achieve, and yet people hold it and hold it and grab it and try to fix it and twist it and turn it. – Amy Sherman-Palladino
It is with flowers as with moral qualities; the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet. – Augustus Hare
If you have an embarrassing story, and it’s a source of shame, keeping it in just compounds the shame and turns the story into something poisonous. And if someone knows about it, then it can be used against you. – Aisha Tyler
Even as a kid, I was a businessman. I figured out that if you plucked all the berries off my neighbor’s tree and smashed them up, they made a Nickelodeon Gak-type consistency. I sold them to all the neighborhood kids and made stacks of quarters. Of course, the berries were poisonous, and I got in all types of trouble. – Adam DeVine
For an event that was wholly created in the poisonous psychological warfare kitchens of the Second World War, run by the ministries of propaganda in many countries, not just by the British or the Americans, but also the Russians and undoubtedly the world Jewish organizations. – Ernst Zundel
A modest dose of self-love is entirely healthy – who would want to live in a world where everyone hated themselves? But taken too far, it soon becomes poisonous. – Geoff Mulgan
Repentance is a sweet solace to conscience as well as the most complete atonement to the Supreme Judge of our offenses; notwithstanding, the tongue of malevolence and scurrility may be continually preparing its most poisonous ingredients for the punishment of a crime, which has already received more than half a pardon. – Deborah Sampson
Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. – Eric Hoffer
I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I’d have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I’d never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that. – Maria Semple
A new understanding of power is replacing our old understanding of power as the ability to manipulate and control. The old understanding of power has become counterproductive to our evolution. What used to be good medicine has become poisonous. Pursuit of the ability to manipulate and control now produces only violence and destruction. – Gary Zukav
All my shoes are named after poisonous flowers, so since the beginning I’ve had the idea of doing something with danger in it. – Chloe Gosselin
People love their animals so much so that they put little clothes on them and necklaces and booties and things like that. And if you love your animal, then you should feed them something that’s not dangerous for them. There’s a lot of poisonous stuff that they’re putting in a lot of that food, those by-products. – Ellen DeGeneres
Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don’t even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too. – Nancy Pickard
My favorite was the one about ‘Snow White’. Those funky little guys with the beards. The poisonous apple. And that cool mirror the evil stepmother used to talk to. You know, she’d ask it all these questions: Who’s the nicest? Who’s the sweetest… Who’s the fairest of them all? And for a while, everything was hunky-dory. – Kathi Appelt
It was but then, when you’re, one of the great poisonous events that have infected us all who were in South Africa is that the idea of difference is drip fed into your veins. It’s that that you fight. – Janet Suzman
Each pineapple plant produces only one fruit per year. It can take up to two years for the pineapple to ripen, and it’s important to wait, because once it’s picked, it can’t ripen any further. The unripe pineapple is not only horrible tasting but poisonous. – Kate Christensen
The big fish run the show. I’m a middle fish, but there are small fish that are poisonous. – Roberto Cavalli
The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks. – Salman Rushdie