Angry Young Man Quotes

“To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You’re everywhere you look, you’re the standard against which everyone else is measured. You’re like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a “woman doctor” or they will say they went to see “the doctor.” People will tell you they have a “gay colleague” or they’ll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a “Black friend,” but when that same person simply mentions a “friend,” everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn’t have the word “woman” or “gay” or “minority” in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses “literature,” “history” or “political science.”

This invisibility is political.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Privilege: A Reader

“When you are angry try your best to go to sleep, it keeps you away from speaking, writing and thinking while you are angry.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Never be too angry beyond repairs. Anger is nothing good to be part of your tributes. Are you angry with someone? The sun is sinking, just drop it now.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Sometimes seeing everything just gets in the way.”
― Chris Lynch, Angry Young Man

“If you cannot stop yourself from getting angry, then at least get angry about things that matters.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.

Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.”
― Michael S. Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era

“When a man is at peace he is a man, when angry he is an animal.”
― Amit Kalantri

“An angry artist tells people what (he thinks) they need to hear. A hungry artist tells people what (he thinks) they want to hear.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The right word at the right time helps you make sense of the world. It helps, but sometimes not a lot.”
― Chris Lynch, Angry Young Man

“An angry enemy is a conquered enemy”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

“Despite its contentious content, 'The Anarchist Cookbook' is such a darkly humorous title for a 19-year-old author to have concocted. Today, it would probably be called 'The Angry Young Man's Portal' or 'IEDs for Dummies.”
― Stewart Stafford

“They seem to think I’m sort o juvenile delinquent, the result of an undesirable background. Give him a normal reliable theatrical home, and you’ll find he can behave as decently as anyone else.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“There was no question in my mind on that muggy August day that within less than a year - and on my father's birthday - Look Back in Anger would have opened, in what still seems like an inordinately long, sharp and glimmering summer.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“If one word applied to that post-war decade it was inertia. Enthusiasm there was not, in this climate of fatigue. Jimmy Porter was hurt because things had remained the same. Colonel Redfern grieved that everything had changed. They were both wrong, but that was hard to see at the time.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“In spite of the concerted press campaign to transform me into some upstart wordsmith who had inexplicably won the pools ('Osborne mellows now he's on £1,000 a week'), I was not earning great sums from any of the three plays now that tow of them had finished their Broadway runs.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“I must be the only playwright this century to have been pursued up a London street by an angry mob. LIke most battle experiences, my own view was limited by my vantage point at the back of the stalls. There was an inescapable tension in the house. The theatre itself took on a feeling of rococo mockery and devilment, too hot, a snake-pit of stabbing jewellery, hair-pieces, hobbling high heels, stifling wraps and unmanageable long frocks.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“...I remembered Binkie throwing a few chips of encouragement to me as he said, with a gleam of disaffection, 'Of course, Noel's quite uneducated.' Whether it implied that the Master was as unashamedly ignorant as myself, expelled and barely literate at fifteen, condemned to a fixed condition of 'not being ready for it yet', I hadn't resolved. It merely seemed a piece of clumsy treachery, a fair example of the reverence for academic skill and a classic misapprehension of its link with creative imagination. Even Binkie, from his own more distinguished production, could have deduced that from Shakespeare to Shaw a little Latin and less Greek, or none of either, did no damage to untutored dramatists.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“How bitter is lovelessness both to suffer and to inflict. More than anything I have dreaded the despair of its remembrance and the threat of its repeat.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Women who are encouraged to complain of 'harassment' have never felt the nasty draft that whistles round a man subjected to female scrutiny. The masculine leer at least is warmed by the breath of inquisitive lust. It may be tedious, even offensive, but it must be preferable to the rubber-glove approach of the female National Health Medical: one's brains as well as balls are up for grabs.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“What Miss Cooper is trying to do is accuse the Student Council of expelling you for personal gain? Well, there’s no problem. To expel such a rumor, we will publicly announce here and on the forum why you and your mate are being expelled from Camdine Academy. After all, our academy trains warriors and powerful members of society, not actresses.”
― Eunice Amnell, The Pack Outcast

“You have generations of men you have grown up with an expectation of advantage who don't have it anymore. And that displacement in status… has made a lot of ordinary people very angry.”
― Van Badham