Insults and Curses, Historical Edition

The Greatest Generation

Join me tonight with a celebration of the well-crafted insult. I completed some basic research and picked out a few of my favorite insults, and then crafted a few of my own. The best part is that since these quotes come from historical figures, writers, philosophers, and politicians, there is almost NO chance anyone you know has ever heard them before. Keep these witticisms alive by recycling them in your daily life!

I wish I had thought of this one. Expressing amazement that a person hadn't yet been horribly murdered is hilarious no matter who you are:

Against Locke's philosophy I think it an unanswerable objection that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.
Thomas de Quincey, on John Locke

I enjoy this gem for the not-so-subtle implication of pedophilia:

I don't think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn't care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning

I am not certain why the statue bears significance here, but no back story is needed to understand his position:

My one ardent desire is that after the war he should be publicly castrated in front of Nurse Cavell's statue.
Lytton Strachey on David Lloyd George

The Irish have a way of dragging a whore with a brood of disabled children into nearly any argument:

May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of Damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope.
Traditional Irish curse

Small backstory here... The Zaporozhian Cossacks in the Ukraine had just defeated the Ottomans in battle, but still received a letter from the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV demanding their surrender to the Empire. The celebrating army sent this written reply containing perhaps the first written record of the practice of calling someone a "motherfucker":

Thou art a turkish imp, the damned devil's brother and friend, and a secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight art thou that cannot slay a hedgehog with your naked ass? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou son of a bitch wilt not ever make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.

Thou art the Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, Armenian pig, Podolian villain, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, a fool before our God, a grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. Thou wilt not even be herding Christian pigs. Now we shall conclude, for we don't know the date and don't have a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year in the book, the day's the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our ass!

I now provide you with a few of my meager attempts. Feel free to borrow, steal or paraphrase:

Your mother is a saint. There is little else that can be said of a woman that shared her bed with the mental invalid that is your father, and managed to resist the urge to drown the resulting filth of your birth.

The smile that you mistakenly assume is taken as "endearing" is better considered a subtle symptom of the inbreeding that marks your familial heritage.

You should be appreciative of the concept of pity, as it is the only obstacle between yourself and routine physical assault.

In your vast capacity for forethought you secured the sanctity of your marriage by carefully selecting the mate with which no other man would consider with lustful intentions.

If you have any worthy originals, send them to PopularIrony@gmail.com and we will make you "internet famous"!